Lather, Rinse, Repeat

I remember I was late for school, as usual.  My mom is quite easily the worst person to ask to get you anywhere on time, and always has been.  We had watched the footage of the towers being hit and burning on the edge of her bed, me wondering if I would get to stay home like when the Columbine shootings had happened three years earlier.  But, my brother was already at school, so reluctantly, she took me to the car and dropped me off.  Walking through the halls, all the doors were open, no one was giving a lecture, all eyes on the T.V's and the smoldering buildings, the cameras catching people leaping to their deaths to escape the fire and trying to lessen the blow by cutting back to the anchors, the impact written over their faces that didn't have the luxury of being to look away from the feed.

And then the towers fell.  And as they crumbled everyone was trying to grapple with the new world that was taking shape around them.  I imagine it must have been harder for my teachers than it was for us.  They had all lived through the Cold War under the constant threat of a nuclear annihilation via the U.S.S.R., but they had also seen that great enemy crumble.  The wolves had been at the door, but America had beaten them back, free to bask in a world where it reigned supreme above and beyond anything that could threaten it.  I wonder if, after the horror, they felt a sense of comfort in the old habit of being afraid of an evil out of the East lurking in the dark, waiting to strike.

Mostly I remember wanting vengeance, we had been hurt, and the world would suffer for it.  And holy shit did that come to pass.  The war in Afghanistan was met with a bloodthirsty glee, a nation ecstatic to bring down death and destruction on a country who's leaders had harbored Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda personnel.  Did it matter that the actual civilians could've cared less for any of the jihadi movements and wanted nothing to do with them?  Fuck no.  They were going to die in the cross fire and we didn't care, because we wanted to prove a point; that however many Americans you kill, we can kill yours ten times over.  A hundred, even, if we feel like exercising.  To date, there are an estimated 31,000 civilian deaths as a result of the war.  So, point taken, I guess.

But this being America, we always have to go bigger.  The civilian death toll from the Iraq War varies based on who's doing the counting, but the range goes from 165,000 on the low end to 1.3 million.  To put that in perspective, that's a 9/11 every day, for either 55 or 433 days straight.  And then there are the drone wars which range from 462-1,459.  But whenever these numbers are pointed out as the enduring cause and motivation for terrorism, the usual response is "Well, we didn't mean to kill those people.  So they don't count."  There are no safety switches on bombs or bullets so that only kill who you want or mean to kill.  Whether by intent or mistake, the dead are still dead.  And a society that refuses to own up to its responsibility in making the dead doesn't have any moral high ground to stand on when it seeks to avenge its own.

Every year we say "Never Forget", every year we seek out new places to bomb and wreck more devastation for longer periods of time on people who had nothing to do with events on one terrible day that's over a decade gone.  The most enduring, and frightening, lesson that 9/11 taught us is that we are as just a part of the world as everyone else.  For a country that has been so war-happy over the last century, we've never actually had to bear any of the costs of the those wars on our own soil.  We've never had to worry checking our farms for undetonated artillery shells or sweeping open fields for landmines.  We've never had to to rebuild our cities after years of air raids and infantry battles.  We'd never been really scarred before 9/11, and the idea that even a fraction of the violence we send out to the world could find its way back home is still, to this day, the most terrifying thing anyone can think of.

I keep waiting for people to realize that letting this fear of an attack from anywhere by anyone at anytime is toxic, that it's deforming who we are as a people.  I keep waiting for people to realize that we're better than this, that choosing to live this way is for fools and cowards.  But every year I see us languish over our damage and then use it to justify the deaths of so many more without considering the consequences and it hits home that no, actually, we're not.