I remember riding my bike around Brooklyn on a crisp clear Tuesday morning in 2001, watching the burning towers on the horizon. The thought I couldn’t shake was, “The response to this will hurt this country more than the attack.”
Over the coming years, the long disaster unfolded. The drums of war were beating, and any who dared question the sacred mission of vengeance was branded a traitor. Our polarized politics finally found unity in endorsing a cruel and self-defeating strategy. The criminals that attacked our country were elevated to warriors, and their cause to Holy War. And we were engaged in Holy War.
Our government invaded and occupied two countries that had little or nothing to do with the attack, and protected the oil-rich country that had a lot to do with it. They used torture and kidnapping and robotic drone bombs, and successfully radicalized a whole new generation of committed terrorists. The bad news came every day, until we just came to accept it as the way things were.
Oh, but the military contractors were banking record profits. After a while no one really believed these operations would bring stability or spread democracy, but those with the right connections were sucking money right from the source, and so the burning would go on and on.
We should have learned from ‘Nam that a war of occupation is never anything but a soul-sucking quagmire. There is never a victory, never a peace with honor, never a triumph of democracy. Only the suffering of the innocent and a perpetual cycle of vengeance.
But it seems no one in power is willing to learn that lesson. They still want to believe in occupation, in vengeance, in eradicating their enemies utterly. They want the thrill of unleashing shock and awe. They want to claim piles of corpses as a trophy. They want to be kings.
Nearly a quarter into a new century, and we’re still fighting all the old wars – hippies vs. squares, the Civil War, the wars of Empire, the wars of Religion. We have new problems, but who has time for those?
CEASE FIRE NOW
cant we all just get along?
– Rodney King