I Wasn’t Going To Do A 9/11 Post

I swear I wasn’t.

Then I logged on to Facebook, and was immediately saturated with a kajillion 9/11 statuses.

While I will take a moment today to say a prayer for those who lost someone due to 9/11 and the events afterward, I cannot abide by the American fascination of ‘picking the scab’ of tragedy every single year.

My wife counted and, not including regular networks, there are 36 channels on DirecTV broadcasting 9/11 stuff today.  Remembering is fine, but this nation’s obsession with 9/11 borders on pornography.

This isn’t going to do one of those sappy “where were you when” types, nor is it going to be one of those “Rah! Rah! Never Forget!” types.  No, this is going to be more of a “what the heck happened and how did we learn the wrong lessons” type.  The way I see it, 10 years ago, the US split into two camps.

The first camp are those who didn’t care why 9/11 happened, aside from jingoistic ‘freedom’ references, and wanted to strike back and wipe out an entire peoples out of anger and fear based on the actions of a few.

These are the ones with the bumper stickers, the flag shirts, who eagerly cheered on this nation to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and see the US not as it is, but as some idealized fantasy version without flaws and justified in everything it does simply because it’s America.

The second camp cared why.  They believed, and still believe, there has to be more behind the motivation of those who would so wantonly take innocent lives like that. They wanted to know the something behind the anger, the rhetoric, the hatred, even if it meant that some of their reasoning could be valid.

That’s the camp I found myself in.  Don’t misunderstand me in this point.  There is never a justification for the taking of innocent life and, no, the US did not deserve it.  I’m tired of arguing these talking points with those firmly ensconced in the first camp who seemingly lack even the most basic of critical thinking skills.

The fact is, our actions have consequences.  On a personal level, and as a nation.  Some of the things we’ve done as a nation have been truly inspiring, some have been truly misguided, and some have been truly ugly.  That’s just fact and history.  For every Berlin airdrop, every tsunami response, every “I have a dream” speech on the National Mall, there’s an Iranian coup, a playing both sides in the Iran/Iraq war, a Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or selling arms to terrorists to fund a secret war in Central America.

If there were lessons I’d wished that we as a nation had learned in the last 10 years, it would be:

1 – Not everyone wants to be Americans, nor do they think that the US is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Other peoples have just as much pride in their country and their culture as we do.  Assuming that people want to be like us insinuates that there’s something wrong with them, with their history, with their culture.

2 – Not everyone appreciates us and, in fact, the things we sometimes do cause feelings of bitterness, resentment, and anger.  The road to hell is often paved with good intentions and we have a long history of not only paving that road, but painting the lines, putting up the signs, and directing traffic.

3 – Our actions have consequences.  The “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” guiding principle of our foreign policy has to end.  It’s that policy that drove us to fund and train the mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980′s.  Reagan praised them saying: