September the 12th

I don’t want to write about Nine-Eleven. I am sick of reading and hearing about Nine-Eleven. I want to talk about September the 12th.

September the 12th is the day after Nine-Eleven. It is the day when people wake up hungover from their commemorations of a mass murder and go back to their everyday lives. It is the day on which Americans can stop thinking about the rest of the world and go back to ignoring Osama bin Laden for another 365 days, or the “war on terror”, or the Middle East, or even President Bush for that matter.

Last time I checked, it was considered improper to glorify a day filled with death. We don’t remember Pearl Harbor Day (December 7th), or the days on which notable Americans such as George Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. died (Marth 4th and April 4th). Instead, we reflect on momentous occassions by hallowing life, and days of life, so that we can celebrate the joy inherent in a person’s existence or the lesson which was distilled by some tragedy. Good Friday is holy, but Easter Sunday is even holier.

And on September 12, all I sense is fear. We are a nation that is afraid, because we have allowed the government to instill us with nothing but fear. The president can speak of a war without end as “the calling of our generation” and not be laughed off the stage by true guardians of freedom. He can quote his mortal enemy and speak of a “Third World War” and not be labelled a purveyor of massive levels of violence. He can scold the countries of the Middle East to recognize that “their greatest resource is not the oil in the ground” and not be instantly hounded as a hypocrite and tool of the oil industries here in the United States.

When a president can do this, he has become a tyrant. And on September 12, 2006, with so many people enthralled to a song-and-dance of perpetual war, there ought to be no mistake that the United States has entered an era of tyranny that, in the next two years, must either consolidate its rule or lose its momentum and ultimately falter. In either situation, it will be the people who will suffer, and their Constitution. Standing amongst the crumbled remains of their representative government, fetid and decomposed by false anxieties that never materialized, hungry and weak from their decayed infrastructure, broken from the burden of an invasive and oppressive government, and with no song or TV show distracting enough to mask the tyranny which will one day envelop them, they will look at each other in the last twilights of their democracy and ask, “Why did we do nothing?” And in those moments, as has always happened and will always happen, it will be only the vultures that respond.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Fear and Tyranny, Government Accountability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.