Ten years later

Has it been ten years already?

Well, no, I can't say the time has flown by, actually. It has been a slow and painful ten years. After an all too brief period in which Americans were united in horror, fear, grief, and finally resoluteness, we turned jingoistic and vindictive. Did we take our cues from the Manichaean world view of the irreflective George W. Bush, or had that ugliness always been present, waiting for the right excuse to emerge? I don't know. All I know is, we did Osama's work for him by changing who we were.

Oh, and we killed and tortured a bunch of people in the process. Can't forget that.

In the wake of the attacks, fear and horror were entirely understandable. I haven't forgotten the thud of my heart falling into my stomach multiple times that morning. I came to life a little earlier than usual when I realized KCBS wasn't following its usual tight schedule. Where was the business report at 6:25? What about the traffic at 6:28? Uh oh. It's never a good sign when they forego the routine. Usually it's for a significant quake. I hadn't felt anything, though.

Why did they sound so disorganized?

The special report at 6:30 gave me the gist: planes had hit the World Trade Center in New York. Holy crap. I bolted out of bed and turned on the TV.

Shots of the towers, black smoke billowing, intercut with replays of United flight 175, the second plane, smashing into the South Tower. In the most shocking close-up you couldn't actually see the impact due to the camera angle but good Lord, I swear you could see the resulting shockwave. And of course, the smoke and dust flying into the sky.

Then -- what the hell? A plane nailed the Pentagon?

What in the hell was happening?

Who was behind this?

How many more planes would hit, and where?

Damage at the Pentagon was still being assessed when everybody cut away to the most devastating development of the morning. Without warning I found myself watching the South Tower collapse: slowly at first, but gathering horrific speed and power like a locomotive getting underway -- headed straight down.

One of the tallest buildings in the world, gone in just a few seconds. Only a tremendous, choking dust cloud marked its passing.

How the hell did a plane, even a big jet, bring down an entire skyscraper? The plane was tiny compared to the tower! (Days would pass before experts reconstructed what happened.)

When the North Tower followed its twin to destruction half an hour later, I was completely numb. No, not merely numb: I was in a state of total disbelief. I had seen, but I could not believe that what I had seen was real. It was days before it all sank in.

So I understood the fear, and the horror, and the grief. We've had a lot of time to get over all three, though. We've had a lot of time to think about where we should be putting our energies.

I wish I could say we used that time wisely.

Thousands of U.S. troops have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. (We may never know how many civilians were killed.) Casualties from combat in Iraq are especially galling since we knew goddamned well that (a) there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the 11 September attacks, and (b) Dubya was ready to move heaven and earth to topple Hussein no matter what.

The Iraq invasion put paid to the tremendous goodwill and sympathy the rest of the civilized world showered on the U.S. It also ended any hope that the country could remain unified behind a common purpose. Oh, and it added trilions to our national debt in large part because the G. W. Bush administration didn't give enough of a shit about paying it down even to consider higher taxes. To the contrary, Bush's imperviousness to common sense and blind devotion to fiscal ideology even made him push through tax cuts.

To this day, the Iraq invasion makes me so angry that I almost hope there is a Hell so the feckless architects of that catastrophe will suffer the consequences of their savage instincts. I'm talking to you, Rummy. And you, Dick. And yes, you too, George. (Wolfowitz and undoubtedly other second-echelon hatchet men should face judgement right alongside all of you as well.) I'd rather have a trial right here on Earth, but it's a fool's hope to imagine the Obama Justice Department will even contemplate it.

The home front hasn't fared well either, and that's almost entirely due to our own misguided efforts. "Patriot Act", "homeland", "war on terror" -- Orwellian-sounding terms for concepts against which the author of 1984 tried to warn the English-speaking world back in 1948. "Homeland" -- isn't that uncomfortably reminiscent of "fatherland", a term permanently stained by Hitler? We had a perfectly good term already available: "domestic". And "war on terror" -- as I said before, that's a boneheaded expression befitting a boneheaded, extraordinarily infantile idea, that one can wage war on "terror".

Employing such provocative and loaded language coerced the populace into a fit state of unquestioning obedience. Challenges to the call for unity were rendered implicit challenges to the welfare of the entire country. In other words, protesting the Bush administration's curtailment of civil liberties in pursuit of a futile and illusory increase in safety implicitly became a near-treasonous act.

We let fearmongers persuade us that every shadow was cast by a terrorist. We literally let ourselves, as a nation, be terrorized. Tell me, how exactly didn't that play into the hands not only of bin Laden, but of every other would-be terrorist out there? What do you think "terrorists" seek?

Why in the hell didn't people see that we finished what Osama started?

The 11 September 2001 attacks were despicable. Unfortunately, so much of what this nation did in response was no better. That, perhaps, is the greater tragedy.