What Have We Learned from 9-11?

Eight years ago a close relative went to work at a company across the street from the Twin Towers site.  I walked over to meet him a few times those first months and found the experience riveting.  The smell, the pictures posted everywhere, the wooden sidewalks built so that people could get past the site.  

It has been a while already.  Those who lost family members or lived nearby still have to deal with the loss.  The rest of us are reminded  every moment when we watch TV, or check the news on our smart phone.  There is a hysterical preacher out there screaming about burning the Koran.  The media has lapped this up like he's Tiger Woods.  There are people going crazy because there is going to be a Muslim community center at the 9-11 site.  Don't these reactive types realize that the more they scream the more unsafe it is for us to fly?

Hardly anything we have done has made our lives and country safer.  Since that time we have been subjected to potentially dangerous  X-rays at airports, pat-downs, and TSA employees who act like drill sargents (and seem to enjoy it).  Ted Kennedy made it to a no fly list - so did my parents who are in their eighties and were going through the airport in wheelchairs (kind of sad for my Dad who fought in the horrendously bloody front in the Philippines during WWII). 

We have been in war mode every since the Twin Towers went down.  Unfortunately, we didn't notice much when 800,000+ Iraqis died during the U.S. invasion.  We kept out eyes closed about military deaths and suicides during the Bush Administration.  We sent our sons and daughters to do their patriotic duty(?) so that our corporations that make military equipment can have bigger profits.  I'm sure (and hope) there are good reasons (other than to feed Capitalism)  for our military presence in the Middle East.  

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Robert Fisk: Nine years, two wars, hundreds of thousands dead – and nothing learnt

Did 9/11 make us all mad? Our memorial to the innocents who died nine years ago has been a holocaust of fire and blood . . .

Saturday, 11 September 2010 - London Independent

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West.

But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place.

Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters...link