The 9/11 Anniversary: Enough already

Without doubt, the 9/11 attack was the most traumatic public event of my adult lifetime, though survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have their own point of view. My head tells me that 9/11 was blowback for the devastation we Americans have wreaked on many lands ourselves, but I have other organs too. 9/11 still yanks my chain.

That's why I find the tenth anniversary obsequies now being foisted on us so repugnant. I hardly recognize the country we've become since 9/11, with our reckless global adventurism and the national security state we've devised to imprison ourselves in a permanent climate of fear.

These, of course, were hardly completely new elements in the land. We'd been going abroad in search of monsters to destroy— and oil depots to occupy— ever since World War II, and the Cold War had been the pretext for a systemic erosion of our civil liberties.

Applauding Cheney

But America's misbehavior has exponentially exploded since 9/11. We've wrecked two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq) on little or no pretext, and are in the process of destroying a third (Libya). We've deprived immigrants, legal or otherwise, of the most elementary human rights, incarcerating them without charge and expelling them without due process. In some cases we've treated American citizens the same way. And we've publicly targeted at least one individual for assassination without process of any kind.

We've come a long way too from Tom Sawyer when we make a hero of Jack Bauer, the torture-happy hero of 24, and when a studio audience can applaud Dick Cheney's defense of waterboarding, as it did the other day on the "Tonight" show. And we fail to see not only what we are doing to our enemies but to ourselves when we brook universal surveillance of our lives, from our Internet habits to the insides of our personal cavities.

The surrender of privacy is the surrender of liberty. We've been partly induced and partly compelled to give up both in the name of security. And, partly, it's been taken from us by stealth through hidden cameras, "information-sharing" arrangements and secret court rulings.

A moment that passed

I was as angry at 9/11 as anyone else, and as gung-ho about going after Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That moment passed when I saw that what we were doing to ourselves and others far exceeded the harm that had been done to us, and with far more lasting consequences.

I still mourn the victims of 9/11, but only alongside the millions of other victims— killed, maimed, or driven into dispossession and exile— we've created since then. These latter victims have been sacrificed on the twin altars of vengeance and "security," although it is often hard to distinguish between the two. For the victims themselves, it's a distinction without a difference.

So I'll think about the victims of 9/11 in my own way, with or without anniversaries. What I didn't see on the day itself— in the fog of hurt, bewilderment and fear— was the beginning of the far larger tragedy that has engulfed us since.♦


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