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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Looking Ahead

Looking Ahead

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The little town downriver from us scared the shit out of me about an hour ago by blasting an air raid siren I never knew existed until today. I only heard it faintly because of the distance, but it was alarming, as it was designed to be.

I’m speculating it was sounded at a noon observance of the 9/11 attacks? Here’s my personal observance of 9/11, and I think it will be the last one I ever share here or anywhere else.

Our daughter was three years old on 9/11/2001. Now she’s 21, and the war that started that day is still going on.

Our nephew was 18 years old on 9/11/2001. Today he’s 36, the father of two small children, and an officer in the US Army serving in Afghanistan. (He’s also done tours in Iraq, including leading foot patrols through Baghdad during the most dangerous period for US service members.)

Last week, Trump apparently mistook diplomats engaged for months/years in peace negotiations for an annoyingly balky reality show production crew and stepped in to personally speed things up for a glitzy Sweeps Week finish. Because he is and always has been an epic fuck-up, Trump fucked that up too, so now the war in Afghanistan will continue for at least another 14 months.

Enough of this fucking bullshit.

Sometimes I wonder how much “Never Forget” gets in the way of “Get the Fuck Out.” Fascist shit-birds like Rudy Giuliani, Karl Rove and Donald Trump will hump the 9/11 attacks until their wizened scrotums pass into dust because they (correctly) perceive it as a path to power.

Their role in extending our national trauma for power and profit has been obvious since the beginning. Joe Biden, God bless him, called Giuliani out on it more than a decade ago.

But even our good politicians feel obligated to issue solemn statements and speak in hushed tones every September 11. Here’s what I wonder: Does fixating on that horrendous day all these years later perpetuate its power and contribute to its potential to cause even more suffering?

I honestly don’t know, but personally, I’m done with “Never Forget,” at least in the prescribed way that the dishonest tragedy-humpers wallow in on this day every year.

Instead, I’ll look ahead and work toward a future where my daughter can consciously live in a country that isn’t “at war” (accursed phrase!) for the first time in her life, and my nephew can come home to his wife and children.

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

108Comments

  3. 3.

    Kylroy

    I’m going to pick a random pop culture example about neverending war, bear with me…

    Tony Stark as Iron Man has a backstory that involves him getting kidnapped while near front lines of a war, as a guest of the US army. Originally it was Korea. Later adaptations used Vietnam, the Gulf War, and of course the MCU used Afghanistan.

    I think it would be great if, at some point in the future, writers *don’t* have an immediately current example of an American war they can just slot into this story.

  4. 4.

    satby

    Here’s what I wonder: Does fixating on that horrendous day all these years later perpetuate its power and contribute to its potential to cause even more suffering?

    I think so. That’s why I skipped the thread below. “Never forget” doesn’t translate into “wallow in it.” Which is being used for bigotry, xenophobia, and imposition of conservative policies most people don’t want.

    I’m done with “Never Forget,” at least in the prescribed way that the dishonest tragedy-humpers wallow in on this day every year.

    Right there with you.

  5. 5.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    Adam did a post a few months ago about our country being “at war”, we’ve been in some state of war since before our founding. It’s not just the memory of the attacks 18 years ago that keep us mired in Afghanistan is’s also the perception of having the service members that died there having “died in vain”. But at some point that argument is like the gambler who stays at the blackjack table saying “the next hand will be the winner”.

  6. 6.

    schrodingers_cat

    I have never understood the “never forget” business. What exactly are we not supposed to forget. After 9/11 America changed and not for the better. I miss the expansive, confident country I came to in the mid nineties. Pre 9/11 America would have never elected this Orange President.

  7. 7.

    lollipopguild

    Thanks for the post but I think we are trapped in a “we cannot stay, we cannot leave” situation here. The president who actually gets us out will be attacked for “losing”.

  8. 8.

    cmorenc

    @Betty Cracker:

    Instead, I’ll look ahead and work toward a future where my daughter can consciously live in a country that isn’t “at war” (accursed phrase!) for the first time in her life, and my nephew can come home to his wife and children.

    EastAsia has always been at war with us here in Oceania, Betty. You obviously aren’t indoctrinated to the perpetual threat they pose if we don’t continue making war on them, or else you are guilty of a thought-crime; either way, you will soon be receiving a visit to take you in for interrogation.

  11. 11.

    rikyrah

    These lowlife muthaphuckas.

    ????

    BREAKING: In an absolute stunner, @NCHouseGOP calls surprise vote on morning of #9/11, override @NC_Governor veto to pass budget with barely half of members present. @ABC11_WTVD @ABCPolitics @NCGOP @NCDemParty @JTHVerhovek @rickklein #ncpol #ncga pic.twitter.com/8GkUbl1BMo

    — Jonah Kaplan (@KaplanABC11) September 11, 2019

  12. 12.

    rikyrah

    “I don’t even think it’s fair to compare Donald Trump to the mob because at least the mob tries to cover up their law-breaking ways… Trump just does it blatantly every day… We have an administration that is corrupt to the core.” – @K_JeanPierre w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/HHTFlwr4BO

    — Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) September 10, 2019

  15. 15.

    Cheryl Rofer

    Thanks, Betty.

    9/11 was a shock and horror. We’ve mourned the dead. People who lost loved ones will always feel the loss.

    But the world keeps changing, and we must change with it. We need to get out of the forever wars, which are killing people and disrupting the world.

    At home, the threat has changed to rightwing terrorists.

    I’ll be having lunch on Sunday with the person with whom I shared 9/11’s fear. I haven’t seen her in a while. I doubt we’ll even mention it.

  16. 16.

    rikyrah

    Biden camp thinks the media just doesn’t get it
    The vice president’s allies say neither detractors in the media, nor his rivals on the stump, understand the root of his appeal.

    By RYAN LIZZA
    09/11/2019 05:01 AM EDT

    The first thing you notice at a Joe Biden event is the age: Many of the reporters covering him are really young. Biden is not. The press corps, or so the Biden campaign sees it, is culturally liberal and highly attuned to modern issues around race and gender and social justice. Biden is not. The reporters are Extremely Online. Biden couldn’t tell you what TikTok is.

    Inside the Biden campaign, it is the collision between these two worlds that advisers believe explain why his White House run often looks like a months-long series of gaffes. For a team in command of the Democratic primary, at least for now, they’re awfully resentful of how their man is being covered. And yet supremely confident that they, not the woke press that pounces on Biden’s every seeming error and blight in his record, has a vastly superior understanding of the Democratic electorate. This is the central paradox of Biden’s run: He’s been amazingly durable. But he gets no respect from the people who make conventional wisdom on the left.

    “I don’t know of anybody who has taken as sustained and vitriolic a negative pounding as Biden and who has come through it with the strength he has,” said a top Biden adviser. “So why isn’t the argument not that he’s a ‘fragile front runner,’ but instead why is this guy so strong? How is he able to withstand this? Because it is unrelenting. Every story that has been written about Biden for a month has been negative! I would ask Warren and Sanders and these folks: He’s been pummeled for months. For months! So why is he going to fall apart now?”

  19. 19.

    HeleninEire

    Right there with you, Betty. I’m glad I’m in Dublin and not in NY today. I was in the city that day and I knew 3 people who died and still I think we are coming close to wallowing in it.

  22. 22.

    rikyrah

    Cheating, Inc.: How Writing Papers for American College Students Has Become a Lucrative Profession Overseas

    By Farah Stockman and Carlos Mureithi
    Sept. 7, 2019

    Tuition was due. The rent was, too. So Mary Mbugua, a university student in Nyeri, Kenya, went out in search of a job. At first, she tried selling insurance policies, but that only paid on commission and she never sold one. Then she sat behind the reception desk at a hotel, but it ran into financial trouble.

    Finally, a friend offered to help her break into “academic writing,” a lucrative industry in Kenya that involves doing school assignments online for college students in the United States, Britain and Australia. Ms. Mbugua felt conflicted.

    “This is cheating,” she said. “But do you have a choice? We have to make money. We have to make a living.”

    Since federal prosecutors charged a group of rich parents and coaches this year in a sprawling fraud and bribery scheme, the advantages that wealthy American students enjoy in college admissions have been scrutinized. Less attention has been paid to the tricks some well-off students use to skate by once they are enrolled.

    Cheating in college is nothing new, but the internet now makes it possible on a global, industrial scale. Sleek websites — with names like Ace-MyHomework and EssayShark — have sprung up that allow people in developing countries to bid on and complete American homework assignments.

    Although such businesses have existed for more than a decade, experts say demand has grown in recent years as the sites have become more sophisticated, with customer service hotlines and money-back guarantees. The result? Millions of essays ordered annually in a vast, worldwide industry that provides enough income for some writers to make it a full-time job.

    ………………………………………….

    The essay-for-hire industry has expanded significantly in developing countries with many English speakers, fast internet connections and more college graduates than jobs, especially Kenya, India and Ukraine. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya has over 50,000 members.

    ……………………………….

    In Kenya, a country with a per capita annual income of about $1,700, successful writers can earn as much as $2,000 a month, according to Roynorris Ndiritu, who said he has thrived while writing academic essays for others.

    Roynorris Ndiritu, 28, who asked that only part of his name be used because he feared retribution from others in the industry in Kenya, graduated with a degree in civil engineering and still calls that his “passion.” But after years of applying unsuccessfully for jobs, he said, he began writing for others full time. He has earned enough to buy a car and a piece of land, he said, but it has left him jaded about the promises he heard when he was young about the opportunities that would come from studying hard in college.

    “You can even get the highest level of education, and still, you might not get that job,” he said.

    In interviews with people in Kenya who said they had worked in contract cheating, many said they did not view the practice as unethical.

    As more foreign writers have joined the industry, some sites have begun to advertise their American ties, in a strange twist on globalization and outsourcing. One site lists “bringing jobs back to America” as a key goal. American writers, who sometimes charge as much as $30 per page, say that they offer higher-quality service, without British spellings or idioms that might raise suspicion about an essay’s authorship.

  23. 23.

    geg6

    I’m with you, Betty. I have my memories of that day and a frantic drive home from State College, PA. I have my memories of my oldest brother’s childhood friend, Chuckie Droz, who died on the flight that hit the Pentagon. But I am done with all the “never forget” moments in history. First, because everyone forgets the lessons of whatever disaster prompts the words. Witness what is happening along the border and I realize the Holocaust is forgotten. Witness Iraq and Afghanistan and I realize that Vietnam is forgotten. Witness white nationalist terrorism and I realize that 9/11 is forgotten.

    As far as I can see, the people who are always piously screaming about “never forgetting” so often are using that perfectly human impulse to have remembrances of traumatic events in order to beat up everyone who doesn’t agree with their political, religious and moral views. I’m done with it. Done. Done. Done.

  24. 24.

    mrmoshpotato

    @rikyrah:

    The whole situation was diffused by Kellyanne Conway… sneezing on Trump

    I don’t remember seeing the Cryptkeeper sneeze ever, and I have all 7 seasons of Tales From The Crypt on DVD.

  25. 25.

    The Moar You Know

    I will repeat a portion of what I posted on the last thread as it’s very relevant to this one:

    “I will be very glad when we, as a nation, can drop this sackcloth and ashes bullshit and this is again just another day, much like Pearl Harbor’s anniversary is. It’s not healthy for us to wallow in this for as long as we have. I won’t even address the political ramifications of this self-flagellation. The wallowing in “our shared national catastrophe” is not good for us as people.”

  26. 26.

    Ladyraxterinok

    @rikyrah: joemygod has a post about these photos. Photographer is furious his integrity is being attacked by claims 1st 1 published was photo-shopped.

  27. 27.

    Avalune

    Leto and I were just having pretty much this exact conversation this morning after the 9/11 Memorial Service at my work place. It definitely does feel co-opted for fear/warmongering more than anything. And yes, power. Hey you don’t want this to happen again right? You don’t want the libtards to take away all our guns and let all the “bad people” in to do this to us again x3000? Right? Right?

  28. 28.

    rikyrah

    uh huh
    uh huh

    Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, to have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly disavow the forecasters’ position that Alabama was not at risk. NOAA, which is part of the Commerce Department, issued an unsigned statement last Friday in response, saying that the Birmingham, Ala., office was wrong to dispute the president’s warning.

  30. 30.

    moonbat

    Thanks for this post, BC. I too look at most of this never forgetting as cover for bad political actors at this point. George Bush II and his boss Dick Cheney saw to that.

  32. 32.

    mrmoshpotato

    Fascist shit-birds like Rudy Giuliani, Karl Rove and Donald Trump will hump the 9/11 attacks until their wizened scrotums pass into dust

    Spot on.

    Let’s memorialize September 11th by remembering W was a terrible President who stayed seated like a moron after being told New York had been attacked. Sure he could’ve told the kids something had come up and would return in the future to finish The Pet Goat, but no.

    Let us also remember bombing the shit out of Iraq in 2003 with Clinton’s remaining budget surplus because Saddam 9/11’ed us.

  33. 33.

    rbandah

    Amen! My husband was working at 7 WTC that day (got home okay, thank dog) and both of us had worked for several years on floor 103 of 1 WTC, and I have had enough of these hollow-ringing commemorations to last several lifetimes.

  35. 35.

    Omnes Omnibus

    We marked the attack on Pearl Harbor for years. I knew that had changed in the fall of 1991, when I was involved in organizing the artillery’s big bash of the year, the St. Barbara’s Day ball. She is the patron saint of the artillery for reason I won’t bore you with, and her saint’s day is celebrated on December 3. The ball is always held on the closest Saturday to that date. In 1991, that was December 7. When we were planning, I noted that it was the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and that, as a military unit, we might not want a big party on that day. We had the event on the 7th and no official mention of Pearl Harbor happened.

    I think that was wrong. We should be aware of our history, but that doesn’t mean we should wallow ceremonial grief. 9/11 still has meaning and will continue to have it until the last people affected by it are are past the age where they have power over the national narrative.

  36. 36.

    Ohio Mom

    The main meaning I take from this anniversary at this point in my life is that preschooler Ohio Son and I were at his OT session when the towers got hit. That was during the stage when he was newly-diagnosed with autism and it wasn’t clear he’d ever master language or anything else, really.

    So I have a very clear memory of what he was like back then, because the whole day is etched in my memory. And now he’s bumbling through community college. It’s turned into a day of satisfaction in his accomplishment.

    Otherwise, I agree, enough wallowing.

  37. 37.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Rudy has tweeted out clip of Our Boys in Blue standing up to the crazed Anti-Fa mob as a 9/11 memorial, with the tag “GOD BLESS AMERICA!”
    I thought it was from some modern version of Red Dawn, but it’s a commercial for some para-military fashion line– Grunt Style–, or something, with the name of the company removed. Apparently it was supposed to be a Superbowl ad, but the network refused it. I vaguely remember some talk about that.

    Susan Simpson @ TheViewFromLL2
    Giuliani is celebrating 9/11 by posting ads for a clothing company. I wonder how much they paid him for this.

    Judy must really be putting the screws to him in that divorce. I wonder if her lawyers found a loophole in the NDA clause(s).

  38. 38.

    justawriter

    I’ve compared how Republicans celebrate 9/11 with the way Serbians still celebrate the anniversary of losing Kosovo in 1389 (more than six freaking centuries) by whipping up some good xenophobic hatred of those people, you know the ones I mean.

  40. 40.

    glory b

    @satby: Personally, I was done with it after about 5 years in. Enough already.

    And I don’t consider myself to any more than mildly smart, but I saw from the beginning that this “War on Terror” would become a morass that I couldn’t see how we would ever get out of.

    Next, ask me about “No Child Left Behind.”

  41. 41.

    MattF

    @justawriter: I think that’s a case of 19th century anti-Ottoman Serbian nationalists conjuring up popular resentment– pretty much out of thin air. And it worked.

  43. 43.

    catclub

    @moonbat:

    as cover for bad political actors at this point. George Bush II and his boss Dick Cheney saw to that.

    Hell, they benefitted from it, when Jeb Bush can say “my brother kept us safe” and is not laughed off the stage.

  44. 44.

    Elizabelle

    It is pornography that Trump sits in the Oval Office.

    And 9/11 is a day to remember the innocents who went to work and about their lives, which ended abruptly by late morning Eastern time. And those who died in the aftermath. Too many of them entirely preventable deaths. They were deaths of choice.

    It is not a day for bellicose fear-mongering and chest-thumping. That is an occasion for pure shame.

  45. 45.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @catclub: kinda related, he could also say “America will be respected again” under a Bush Restoration. There’ wasn’t a reporter there who didn’t know what had happened to America’s world image from Bush to Obama, but they all just dutifully nodded and made notes.

  46. 46.

    Ohio Mom

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: That was a weird, revolting commercial, and after a little googling, I see that it is from a weird, revolting company.

    It looks like the macho cousin of Tomi Lahren’s yoga pants line. Obliviously there is a sector of the garment industry focused on deplorables, who knew?

  49. 49.

    hitchhiker

    On 9/11 it had been just over 6 months since mr hitchhiker took a freak fall and broke his neck. Our kids were in middle school. We lived in a Seattle suburb, in a front-to-back split level house with four sets of stairs, not counting the two steps through the front door that had become an impossible feat for him to climb.

    He’d lost 50 pounds during his 3 months stay in the trauma center. He couldn’t dress himself. He needed equipment to pee, and an hour to poop. He had urinary tract infections every other week, each of which required me to collect a little bottle of cloudy pee from him and deliver it to a lab so we could get another antibiotic prescription. I was seeing a therapist to keep from losing my mind. He was 46 yrs old, and might never work again.

    So I know that 9/11 was a horrifying trauma for the people directly involved. Sudden, meaningless random loss on a grand scale is impossible to describe.

    But goddamn … for those of us across the country with no particular connection (beyond shared citizenship) to the victims and their survivors, this became — to me — an obvious and disgusting managed mass hysteria. We were all required to be horrified and scared, and not just for the weeks following, but for YEARS, as W and his team carefully manipulated the public to support its pre-existing goals in the Middle East.

    I had genuine trauma and loss staring me in the face every minute of every day that year. I just rolled my eyes at the spectacle of “shared grief,” because it was obvious that most of the country was playing out some kind of script and struggling to feel the proper feelings.

  52. 52.

    David Fud

    The “Never Forget” fetish is all about who is the biggest victim. Claiming victimhood in this ritual way every year allows us to excuse our excesses as a nation, and gives us a rationale for the bigotry and warfare that has increased since those events.

    So, yeah. I am done with it. I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want to wallow in that devastation. And I am sick of our country creating devastation. Please focus on the healing, helping, and improving things, folks. No one will forget 9/11, but we don’t need to wear it on our sleeve.

  53. 53.

    Kay

    @schrodingers_cat:

    I miss the expansive, confident country I came to in the mid nineties.

    Me too. I think Trump’s Wall perfectly captures it, too. A big, dumb, expensive blank WALL. It says “we’re mean-spirited and ungenerous and we don’t want to grow and change or learn anything”.

    I think we’re supposed to contribute something to the next generation. Just grudingly and inadequately and barely maintaining what others built and earned isn’t good enough. It won’t work anyway. This grasping, fearful selfishness isn’t going work even as far as keeping what we have.

  54. 54.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Elizabelle: In my view, there three things we should remember from 9/11 because each of them should inform our decisions going forward. First, we should remember the people who died. Second, we should remember the actions our country took that caused Atta and the rest to make such an attack. Some may have been right, some may have been wrong, but 9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum. Finally, we should remember what our country did both domestically and internationally. A lot of people with power shat themselves with fear and lashed out. Those were the good ones. Others cynically manipulated and stoked the fear to get our nation’s approval for a lot of terrible actions.

    I say never forget, but don’t be an idiot about it. From the time that movement conservatives began their campaigns in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, we have been losing confidence and a country. Things that were taken for granted like schools and infrastructure maintenance somehow became too hard and too expensive. Then we became afraid of everyone and everything. We need to remember 9/11 because it show the horrible and stupid shit we can do when we act out of fear.

  57. 57.

    jamey

    A lot of people say that “9-11 changed everything.”

    I correct them by saying that the world of 9/11 was exactly the same as the world that existed on 9/10 and before; we just became AWARE of threats that others (Londoners, Tel Avivers, Madrilenos, etc) lived with for decades–and without losing their shit over it.

  59. 59.

    Kay

    David Roth
    @david_j_roth
    ·3h
    Rudy Giuliani sharing an overtly fascist commercial for a Troop Lifestyle clothing brand at 1:53am on the anniversary of September 11 is exactly exactly exactly where the culture is right now. No one else needs to tweet anything today.

    The same people who harangued us all into observing this anniversary don’t even show any respect themselves. He’s made this into his brand. He’s been directly cashing in on it almost from the first day. We’re supposed to ignore this? Pretend it isn’t happening? For WHO?

  63. 63.

    Omnes Omnibus

    I feel that I should use this thread to push again a very good book about how to use history in analyzing situations and making decisions. It is Thinking in Time by Neustadt and May.

  64. 64.

    BlueGirlFromWyo

    One thousand times this. I am so tired of ginned up fear being an excuse for putting xenophobic pick pockets in power.

    I drove past a burning Pentagon on 9/11, with rumors that I was driving toward a burning State Department on the radio. I still managed to see the wars as the clusterfucks they’ve been and not hate brown people. Because I know one thing deep in my bones: no one makes good decisions when they’re afraid. And too many Americans prove this every single day.

  71. 71.

    germy

    The truth about Rudy:

    He killed those firemen. Gave them cheap radios. Everybody within spitting distance of New York knows it. The only reason he was on the street doing that damn dumb Churchill act because he insisted on putting the city command center in 7 World Trade Center. He can go to hell. t.co/kCb2Jic9e9— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) September 11, 2019

  73. 73.

    dww44

    @Elizabelle: I absolutely agree with your Trump statement. This morning I switched to C-Span for coverage and somehow ended up watching assembled folks on the WH South Lawn and then the doors opened, the music stared up, and out walks Trump and Melanie.

    I switched to another C-Span and settled on the ceremony at the Pentagon, which was mostly mercifully silent. Listened to the name reading of victims ( a local person died in the Pentagon that day), and then the official ceremonies started with Chairman of Joint Chiefs, DefenseSecretary, and lo and behold Trump and Melania again! How did they get there so fast?

    In his remarks the Defense Secretary lauded Trump for all he had done for the armed services and to fight terrorism. He was succeeded by Trump who was obviously reading prepared remarks from a Teleprompter in a sing-song voice. I listened to see how long it would take him to turn the remarks into an “I and my”event. Not long. He segwayed into his cancellation of the peace talks with the Taliban. He also said that he and some people who worked with him went down to Ground Zero to help out. Did that really happen? I muted TV. But C-Span cut off coverage during his remarks to cover the House of Representatives session!

    I do agree that our coverage of the events of 9/11 is over the top. Playing on patriotic sentiment is how the GOP stays in power. That, and cheating, and being absolutely unafraid to engage in power plays, as Rikyrah noted in another comment.

  75. 75.

    karen marie

    What infuriates me about “Never Forget” is how glib it is. “Never Forget” what? “That we were attacked for our freedoms!” That was bullshit straight out of the gate.

    What we as a country have apparently forgotten (in large part because of the chickenshit press) is the thoroughly rotten “leadership” that did nothing to stop something they were explicitly warned about and then told lies – and bullied anyone who challenged those lies – to drag us into an invasion and – essentially – murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children despite having zero responsibility for the actions of the Saudi Arabians headquartered in Afghanistan who were in fact responsible.

    That’s what I will “never forget.”

    Trump may have amped up the level of incompetence and corruption but both have long found a solid home in the Republican party. I spit in the general direction of every member, sponsor and supporter of the GOP.

  76. 76.

    Elizabelle

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    From the time that movement conservatives began their campaigns in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, we have been losing confidence and a country. Things that were taken for granted like schools and infrastructure maintenance somehow became too hard and too expensive.

    Ah yes. Can’t do America. Can’t do, can’t do, can’t do. If the conservatives cannot sour you on the idea of schools and infrastructure as public good we all deserve and pay for, they will make damned sure there is way too little money to fund public goods properly.

  78. 78.

    sukabi

    @satby: agree. You can remember without wallowing. It would be much better if in remembering we also learned something and reconnected with the promise of the country instead of letting the wealthy strip it bare and board it up.

  79. 79.

    catclub

    @Elizabelle:

    they will make damned sure there is way too little money to fund public goods properly.

    and Lee Atwater knows that getting white people to pay for roads and services that black people might use is …
    a falling down bridge too far.

  80. 80.

    Elizabelle

    @dww44: I wonder if we need to let the networks etc. know that it’s time to dial down their coverage, and why. I wonder if they get the eyeballs they’re expecting — they may not, but be afraid to not provide the “always remember” crap.

    Fox News, of course, could happily run a 9/11 all day every day channel [they kind of already do], but they’re not real life any way.

  81. 81.

    Yarrow

    Thank you, Betty. This is also my approach. I honor those who were lost but we as a country need a different approach.

    Neuroscience shows that if we repeat things over and over again we develop a sort of “superhighway” for that thought pattern, habit, whatever in our brains. We can change that but we have to work at it. Focusing on 9/11 and “never forget” continues to solidify that way of thinking and doesn’t encourage alternate views and approaches. I think it’s essential that we begin to move away from “never forget” and toward something new.

  82. 82.

    Gravenstone

    @Omnes Omnibus: Thank you for this comment. As I was reading through the thread, it occurred to me that “never again” has value. But that value is now much more a matter of remembering all the wrongs done in our collective names as an aftermath to the events of 9/11/2001. What our government has unleashed on this world due to the fear and avarice and petulance of a a handful of powerful men (aided an abetted by so many more) will take generations to recover from. If we ever truly can.

  84. 84.

    Ohio Mom

    @hitchhiker: What happened to Mr. Hitchhiker after that horrible first year? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story of the hitchhiker family before. I am in awe of what you got through.

    I will add, I shared that annoyance at the mass hysteria. Even a year or two after, parents at my kid’s preschool were obsessed with what would happen if the school was targeted?! So much narcissism. Our little elementary school on a side street in a Cincinnati suburb was not on anybody’s list for anything.

  85. 85.

    mrmoshpotato

    @catclub:

    and Lee Atwater knows that getting white people to pay for roads and services that black people might use is …
    a falling down bridge too far.

    Don’t forget those roads might give women of any race access to abortion, but that’s more of an 80’s to present Rethuglican howl.

  86. 86.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    this is in reference to what I believe is Ari Fleischer’s annual 9/11 tradition of live-tweeting what happened in Bush’s entourage that day

    Tommy Vietor @ TVietor08
    Ari Fleischer should live tweet the day Bush received the “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US” PDB brief or some of their cool meetings about selling the war in Iraq!

    Remember “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out”?

  87. 87.

    J R in WV

    @Jay:

    Oh. My. doG! An 8+billion Pounds Sterling bet on the failure of the British National Economy by people who have spent hundreds of millions of Pounds on political work to force the Leave position upon the government.

    Could there be a more criminal political act ever planned?

    Should these criminals be hanged from the Tower of London?

    Should the recipients of their illegal political contributions hang with them??

    Or perhaps the British could bring back the old punishments, drawn and quartered on BBC live video broadcast, to deter further criminal political conspiracy!!??! One at a time, and forced to watch the previous executions while waiting their turn. I thought Trump was despicable, but he’s a piker compared to these Brexit financier robber barons

    The British Tory government will need a bigger Army to keep the order if this goes as Komrade Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, working for Moscow money laundry services gets his way. The biggest theft in history — billions and billions of Pounds Sterling in short seller positions already ordered IN PUBLIC~!!~

  90. 90.

    Gelfling 545

    We heard the news as we were assembling to go into my mother’s funeral. And so the day never got to be about her and saying goodbye and remembering her life. And so for some of us our grief got…complicated. Thus, I hate to be reminded of 9/11. Maybe I’d feel better if they talked about peace & healing but they don’t. They just keep beating the drum & picking the scab.

  92. 92.

    Omnes Omnibus

    BTW I think the people who are skipping the thread below are selling Alain a bit short. He wrote a very thoughtful essay on the anniversary and some of the things we have lost as a result of our reaction to the attacks. Don’t read it if you don’t want to, but don’t lump Alain in with the wallowers without giving him a chance.

  93. 93.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ohio Mom: If I were a terrorist leader places like elementary schools in random towns, suburban shopping malls, high school football games, etc., are exactly what I would target. Michael Collins said (and Lenin liked to quote him) that the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. If you hit several of those sorts of places, people will never know if the grocery store or the YMCA in their town is going to blow up at any time.

    Yes, the idea is horrific.

  94. 94.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Something I said in the dead thread is that I think 9/11 contributed to the knee-jerk adulation of police and the hostile reaction to Black Lives Matter. Lumping in police with firefighters as the heroic emergency First Responders–9/11 cemented a lot of that rhetoric at a time when fear of urban crime would have been otherwise declining.

  96. 96.

    Yarrow

    @Omnes Omnibus: That’s pretty much what’s happening with the white guy/white supremacist mass shootings. Is it going to happen at this supermarket? The Wal-Mart? The high school? The concert? The local government building? The synagogue? It could happen anywhere. Terrorism.

  97. 97.

    FelonyGovt

    9/11 was an undeniably significant event in US history, like the assassination of JFK which I remember to this day, even though I was only 9 years old. I think commemoration of it, as we commemorate the JFK assassination on 11/22, is appropriate. But I agree that it’s been perverted into a pseudo-“patriotic” gung-ho let’s-go-to-war all-purpose Republican event. It needs to be dialed back.

  98. 98.

    catclub

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    The D.C. sniper attacks were a series of coordinated shootings that occurred during three … The snipers were John Allen Muhammad (aged 41 at the time) and Lee Boyd Malvo (aged 17 at the time), ….. order against him, lived near the Capital Beltway in Clinton, a community in suburban Prince George’s County, Maryland.

    This is why al Qaeda has no understanding of the US. They would rather try for another 9/11 than send out very low cost sniper teams.
    These two goofballs shut down DC suburbs for outdoor activity. They probably had a budget under $5k.

    Now send 20 teams.

  100. 100.

    Matt McIrvin

    @catclub: I don’t know– Giuliani and Trump notwithstanding, it’s been noticed many times over the years that in the US the further you were from 9/11, the less it actually affected you, the more politically disordered it made your thinking. Terrorists attack NYC and DC and people worried about invaders landing on the shores of Kansas. And a lot of it had this surreal obligatory play-acting quality. To terrorize is one thing, but a big symbolic insult to the country like that seems to have had a powerful ability to inspire morbid fantasies that actual terror maybe wouldn’t.

  102. 102.

    debbie

    I don’t think “Never forget” even enters my mind whenever I remember 9/11. My mind is too full with the tragedies of the thousands of victims.

    @geg6:

    Witness what is happening along the border and I realize the Holocaust is forgotten.

    Maddening.

  104. 104.

    hitchhiker

    @Ohio Mom:

    We muddled through, as one does. Thank you for asking.

    After 4 yrs he was able to work again, and has been at it ever since. Did you know it’s possible to speed-type on an adaptive keyboard using just one hand? He’s a software engineer, and that’s how he does it. I worked for a while at the only job I could find where you could be part time and still get insurance: Starbucks. Close to home, flexible hrs, unbelievably good insurance … but yeah. I was 50 with 2 degrees, and it was the only thing I could do. Then I published 3 books, and have a 4th in the end stages. :)

    By chance, both our daughters flew out of Seatac today, each of them on the first official work travel. I got a titch creeped out when I realized what day it was. I wouldn’t mind the remembrance stuff so much if it wasn’t so clearly meant, in many cases, to manipulate people.

    It’s like when random guys rend their garments outside abortion clinics. Where does this emotion come from? You have nothing to do with the women inside. You’re weeping and shouting over terminating pregnancies when you could be helping some poor foster kid or adopting a special needs baby? The world is full of real pain … there’s something awful about watching people try to invent it or appropriate someone else’s for the joy of catharsis.

  105. 105.

    misterpuff

    @rikyrah: You gotta let the boss get his beak wet!

    Even if it is against election finance rules.

    Parscale is making bank on Drumpf’s rubes, so unfair!

  106. 106.

    misterpuff

    @catclub: I thought that when Trump shot down that line of reasoning in the GOP debates that we could move on, but the current administration has taken up the mantle. Which is even more ridiculous that Jeb’s comment.

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