Six Years Ago & One Day

On this day after the sixth anniversary, it seems as though terrorists at this point have little desire to execute any further attacks on the US, for now, because (unlike that of our blessed president) their mission has already been accomplished. Under the present leadership, if you can actually call it as much, this country has devolved into a state where precious few of the principles this country was founded upon have not been trampled, ignored, stretched and done away with… Ironically, these are the same measures our military currently employs to torture “enemy combatants” and the sort.

“President” Bush most likely had nothing to do with planning the attacks, but he in turn most certainly did precious little or nothing to prevent such events from transpiring, as goes without saying that this president would be more than insignificant if 9/11 had not occurred. As blogger Gary Kamiya from salon.com alluded to, these attacks exposed this country for what it really is at this point in its history: a nation full a lazy, ignorant, unintelligent, uninformed consumers that know little else but how to consume.

No, bin Laden or whoever else need not even lift a finger, except to press the record button on his camcorder to taunt and further embarrass this already thoroughly humiliated country.

I sincerely wonder how much longer we could have shut out the rest of the world from knowing our true colours if said attacks had not occurred… I imagine had we not been attacked on our own soil, we would have been caught with our pants entirely down at some point in the future. We had been going in the wrong direction for quite some time and I question how much a President Gore or Kerry would have done to get the ball moving the other way. Don’t get me wrong, any one of the Spice Girls could have accomplished a more positive agenda than this ‘numb nuts’ (to quote the venerable Danny DeVito), but perhaps something catastrophic had to happen in order to turn this country around. It is only human (if not just American) nature to wait until the literal or figurative levee breaks before some kind of action is taken.

To be sure, it is most tragic that those who died on 9/11 had to pay the ultimate price for our country’s collective ignorance, but what’s done is done and there is considerable work to be done to right our oh so many wrongs. We must be more honest with ourselves and others, as we have bore witness to just how awry a nation can stray if honesty does not come from its so-called leadership on down. We must honestly assess where we are, where we are going and what precisely can be done if we don’t like what we see up ahead.

Depending on whom you believe, anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters to nine-tenths of Americans see considerable peril up ahead, yet few of these people are willing to take action. This word has become as foreign a concept in this country as reading for fun or being well informed, as some very brave people over two hundred thirty years ago felt it imperatively necessary to be as much.

We must focus on how much action must be taken to ensure our own freedom and more recently, just how much action has been taken to steal those very same freedoms away from us. Do a little compare and/or contrast and I believe many more people would indeed be inclined to take a little action.

The terrorists on September the Eleventh, Two Thousand and One, in the Common Era, took action so that their point could be made to us and the rest of the world that we are a mere shadow of the great country we once were, yet still again could be. The only way to prove our greatness is by showing them that they can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom; only we ourselves can do that.