9/11: "So Ten Years Ago"

I thought one celebrates their victories, not their defeats. It’s “T-Ball,” estrogen-laden, liberalism that has reduced us to a nation of Pollyanna’s. Ten years after 9/11 we are bankrupt, mired in recession and celebrating a a five acre hole in the ground.

Every week in Israel some homicide-bomber blows up a busy intersection and kills a hundred people. What do the Israelis do? They rebuild the intersection, the stores reopen and life goes on. A month later all that remains of the incident are perhaps some small holes in the stucco. Here we build a park, we commission some artist to create a statue. In some Jackson Pollard way that statue is supposed to remind us of what happened while not making us angry. Ground Zero is New York's number one tourist attraction. It eclipses the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium. Hey everyone, come take a look at America's hole!

America's hole is so big that five trillion dollars of debt, twenty percent unemployment, airport strip searches and the lives of ten thousand soldiers can't fill it. We now have ten million dollar border crossing stations on rural farm roads on the Canadian border. We now have senior citizens and children marching past TSA agents while they yell Mach-Schnell! at our airports. We have a sheriff in Pigs Knuckle Arkansas with an Apache helicopter. We have transparent backpacks, metal detectors in malls, color coded threat levels and duct tape on our windows. We have trillions of dollars of wasted money, all meant to create the illusion of safety.

Someone who has been to Afghanistan told me what it will take to win that war: “20 years, 20 trillion dollars and 200,000 lives.” We have neither the will, nor the resources. We send out a million dollar missile to kill two peasants. The Taliban hires a peasant for five dollars, gives him a hundred year old rifle and twenty dollars worth of ammo and he keeps a whole company of Marines pinned down for a day and possibly kills one.

As a nation we have grown old and entered the stage of despair. We talk about the old-days, we make do with less, we are consumed with security and stifled by ambivalence. We think in terms of our life expectancy instead of our children's future. We are a collection of platitudes, PSA commercials, politically correct androgynous zombies claiming to be free a people. A free people would have rebuilt the Trade Center in two years, made it 125 stories high and put SAM missiles on the roof instead of a restaurant. Instead, "men without chests" and a throng of "empty suits" will be holding a Ten Year Celebration. Fill the freakin hole! It's a hole in the heart of our country. Then again, perhaps they are afraid of losing the tourist dollars.

The U.S. is like the cape buffalo surrounded by hyenas. It’s death by a thousand small bites. We don’t feel the bites because we are too busy celebrating our “hole in the ground.”