Frank Miller said something today
For the first time in my life, I know how it feels to face an existential menace. They want us to die. All of a sudden I realize what my parents were talking about all those years.
Patriotism, I now believe, isn't some sentimental, old conceit. It's self-preservation. I believe patriotism is central to a nation's survival. Ben Franklin said it: If we don't all hang together, we all hang separately. Just like you have to fight to protect your friends and family, and you count on them to watch your own back.
So you've got to do what you can to help your country survive. That's if you think your country is worth a damn. Warts and all.
Left unanswered is the question no one ever dares to ask.
Is it?
Mr. Miller knows the answer is yes, having never conceived that “we” could just up and have a new country any time enough of “us” decided to do so. It’s happened before, all over the world, as have tragedies destructive as, or more destructive than, the events at New York City, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11th, 2001.
They are happening even now, all over the globe, and we are lighting candles in the hope of stopping them. We are doing exactly as we’re told. We are going to work. We are shopping. September 11th changed the world. Five years later, I look back fondly at what I had. It was and innocence. I recognize that now. A high vantage point where I could lob eggs at the “responsible” and pat myself on the back for doing it. No more.
We, the people, have not changed a damn bit for the better. We’ve become paranoid, fearful, even more insecure. We are a nation of perpetual teenagers, crying and destroying furniture because “they” hate us.
“Why,” someone once asked, “do they hate us?” Five years out, it seems like something a Group Leader might at the bi-weekly Abusive Husbands United support group meet-n-great/potluck. We’ve shown them why, as we’ve shown them before, and will undoubtedly show them again if, as I believe must happen, our memories improve.
The War Against Terror has already been fought and won. Ronald Regan declared in his first term, when state-sponsored terrorism became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy as soon as he entered office in 1981. By 1985, President Regan was denouncing the “evil scourge of terrorism” in both the Middle East and Central America, both of which became hot fronts in a period marked by slowly, but unevenly, heating war. He “won” it the way all wars are won: by building a broad coalition of Third World strong men with murderous thug armies and, occasionally, injecting American troops where needed, in various hot spots…but always on the cheap, always quickly and succinctly. The memory of Vietnam was till with Regan’s war planners.
“We” (that is, our government) is fighting the same war today, with the same tactics, the same ill-laid plans. I realized this when I saw Mohammad Karzai and General Perez Musharraf standing side by side, our “allies” in the war on terror. One a CIA asset, hand picked to lead the still-unreconstructed Afghanistan. The other a General who seized power after a failed war with our other regional ally, India. Who forced the democratically elected president, the president he swore to serve, into exile and retroactively pardoned himself for his own successful coupe. Who’s army and intelligence service have just signed an “agreement” with the Taliban forces camped out along the porous, mountain-cluttered border lands of northern Pakistan. A treaty, the terms of which basically amount to, “You don’t fuck with us, we don’t fuck with you. Try not to have too much fun.”
We cannot stand for “friends” like these. To say nothing of the Saudi Royal Family. But it’s not enough to simply say that. We must tell those we elect to represent us exactly what we think about America’s bestest friends. We should remember that nothing breeds terrorists like the collapse of a Third World Nation. And nothing helps that collapse more like the leadership of an unbalanced, dictatorial ass.
We must inform our leaders that they hold the true keys to war and peace, not the one man in the white building down the street. They have ceded that power for far to long and they must take it back from him.
Once that’s done it’ll be a piece of cake for us to take it back from them. Because until they realize that they can no longer blithely send our sons and daughters, our husbands and wives, our sisters, brothers, cousins, parents and grandparents, to kill and die at a whim, then and only then, will we have begun the long and arduous task of honor the victims of September the 11th.
To do anything less is the real tragedy of this day.
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