I've been fighting this feeling, trying to get inspired by something, but between boring thoughts on gender differences and wanted to reach over and smack one of my co-workers this seems safer.

I apologize in advance, I'm kind of tired of all the 9/11 stuff we're getting innundated and this, sadly, will be no refuge. If I were you I'd find soemthing else to go read.



But anyway...

The thing that comes to mind is how ordinary it all feels. It makes me wonder if my dad felt the same way on the morning of December 7th when his mother sent him to get some bread and he heard at the bakery that Hawaii had been attacked.

The day had been about to be so ordinary.

A year ago I was living with my parents and I woke up in my childhood bed in the room I shared with my sister. I had a little alarm radio and it went off promptly at six and was set to 1070 AM. As I was dragged toward conciousness I understood that they were talking about a plane that had hit one of the World Trade Center buildings in New York. My muddled brain tried to figure out what that meant and at first I thought it was a small private plane - Cessna or something - had managed to get seriously fucked and accidentaly crashed. Then the announcer came on with a serious voice to let us know that they had just recieved word that a second plane had hit the other World Trade Center tower.

I leapt out of my bed at that, immediately understanding that this was no accident. I raced to the living room and turned on the TV and crouched down holding onto my knees.

My brain was, for once, silent. There wasn't anything to think about. The world was evolving continuously and this was a large breakthrough in that evolution. People who say everything changed that day are missing the bigger picture.

My mom got up soon after and heard the TV and came into the living room. If anything, she had even less of a reaction than I did. She laid a hand on my sholder and told me to pray for New York and went to rouse the rest of the family.

As I stumbled back into my daily routine I thought about the things that would happen now and how little of it I wanted to face. 1984 and A Brave New World were not lost on me, but I had always noticed a step missing. And that was a convincing way for the world As We Know It to become the totalitarian states we tried to tell ourselves only existed in fiction. I imagined our government and "security" forces would demand, and probably be granted, more power and an easing of investigative restrictions in the name of effectiveness. I hoped with everything I had that the perpetrators would turn out to be citizens, like they were in Oklahoma.

The drive into work was horrible in part, I think because everyone was driving slowly, listening to the radio. No one got mad. Most folks seemed courteous, just not in a hurry, which was fine with me. At the security desk in the lobby dozens of people crowded around the black and white TVs the guards have. In the office everything was quiet and a look of acknowledgement was the only "hello" anyone would get.

The Net was a mess, all newsites had trouble loading, KCRW's stream was frequently knocked out and overloaded. And I did my work at a snail's pace.

Work was a mess then and for weeks to come. I won't go into details for legal reasons but damn. So many reactionary rules went into place over the events that I nearly quit out of frustration.

In the early afternoon we were gathered for an emergency meeting. All day I had been looking at people and many they had been silently hunched over newsites, but others too could be seen wiping away a tear. At the meeting our managers told us they understood we were distracted, that the whole world was distracted and that they understood we couldn't possibly be at the top of our game. Then they dismissed us for the rest of the day.

I drove to Long Beach slowly taking in more news. No planes in the sky. Military movement across the nation and around the world. Zeroing in on Afghanistan. For a moment I felt some lighter part of this mess. For a year, thanks to NPR I had been hearing the horror stories of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thinking of RAWA and the courageous women who dared stand up to the patriarchs of their society frequently whipped me into a fury. Before September 11th I would think of Afghanistan only in the terms of wishing I was able to arm the women against their opressors - their own husbands and sons - and feeling futile at my inability to help. After the 11th my thought was ask the wind to tell them "Be strong, we are coming."

I fully understand the US's actions there were not for the benefit of the women, that ridding the place of the Taliban government did little to further the war effort to hunt down Il Qaeda. but seeing women return to work without their burkas has made me feel sooo much better.

That night I settled into Long Beach it was strangely silent and I realized how much noise planes and helicopters make even when they're far. It made me nervous. I recounted to Molasses the stories my dad used to tell. He was a kid in Orange when Elliot Ness and his Untouchables were taking out crime bosses in Chicago. He said that as kids they were afraid of the gangsters. The adults were afraid of the gangsters and the radios and newspapers said everyone should be afraid of the gangsters. So he and his brothers would go to bed afraid that there might be a gangster creeping down Cypress Street looking for a chance to do them in. I felt the same way.

In the months after our federal government has done numerous things to utterly piss me off with regard to the issues of security and the so-called war on terrorism. When Dubya came on the air telling us to buckle down for a long and complicated situation I was convinced *he* had no idea of the scope he was talking about.

Now I am certain of it.

He's telling us that Iraq stands to pose a threat to use because it will soon be able to build The Bomb. It irritates me that the response he is contemplating is the same fucking sentiment that got us in this goddamned situation. Two years ago Dubya would have had trouble finding Iraq on a map, a year ago he would have tried send somebody to make concessions, now that he has some kind of precedent (and an approval rating that's average for a war-time president, which is to say higher than I think it should be) he's talking war/invasion/attack. He hasn't bothered trying to show how that's relevant to 9/11, or even terrorism, but suddenly, and against all common sense, pre-emption is the only thing that matters.

I've heard the arguements that there is glory in going it alone, that it doesn't matter if the rest of the world that disagrees with us, we'll be the only ones in the world that are right. It's all bullshit. It's the same kind of thinking that made people react by ramming airplanes into our buildings. It's a madness brought on by hubris and fed by joy in our big dicks, I mean bombs.

What happened a year ago is a tragedy, to be sure. And out there somewhere (possibly dead) is Osama bin Laden and several cohorts who are responsible. But the actual source, the catalyst that brought this about is our own foreign policy that vacillates between arbitrarily helping some group of oppressed people over another group and getting our fingers into some money-making pie. Usually we try to do both at the same time.

It makes us look overbearing, boorish, arogant and immature. And then we have a fucking cowboy for a president. Look, being a cowboy doesn't make a person less worthy as a *person* but that doesn't automatically mean that such a person has the qualities useful in a world leader. Just like being intelligent and a part of the "coastal elite" (remember that?) doesn't mean that such a person is automatically unworthy of any respect.

Tragically, the country in general likes to espouse an attitude that appears from the outside to be overbearing, boorish, arrogant and immature. How do they responde to being told that they appear overbearing, boorish, arrogant and immature? They get MORE overbearing, boorish, arrogant and immature.

I think that's the worst thing that the terrorists did to this wonderful country. They robbed it of it's ability to be innovative in the way it governs itself. Our own precious Constitution has been co-opted, corrupted and compromised until it is nearly meaningless.

Not that they care of course. Osama and the other guys couldn't be bothered to give a shit about whether or not we go about our normal lives, about what our economy is like or if we light a candle or not tonight. They just want us to die.

It's a sentiment that isn't tough to understand, even if we don't agree with it. Plenty of Americans wanted "them" to die even before we knew who "they" would be. Plenty of Americans were sure that when we would retaliate it would be like raining hellfire on our antagonists. Well folks, it doesn't work that way.

If we have any brains left at all we will recognized that it will probably never work that way again. When Dubya got into office I was horrified to find that he wanted to up spending on Defense for more armaments, especially on R&D for stuff that wasn't really meant to counter anything currently in existence. Christ, give the soldiers more take-home pay, sure I'm totally with that. But the last ten year of warfare *everywhere* in the world has been in the streets fighting guerilla groups comprised of nationals of the given country the conflict was in. It's what Russia has been dealing with in Chechnya, it's what's been going on for 40 years in Anglola, and for goodness' sake it's been going on in Isreal forever.

Currently the only country worth worrying about on the level Dubya was talking about is China. But they're one of our most favored nations, right? We make how much money every year because of China? I would say that Taiwan is at best a poker game, but remember, we have a *cowboy* for a president.

*sigh*
Makes me want to run for office.

I couldn't possibly fuck up as bad as they have.