Ours To Remember
POST 1100
9/11
It’s 23 years since that terrible day. I went there a few weeks afterward and saw the devastation and the thick cloud of toxic dust that the clean up workers were breathing. Some agency of the federal government told them it was safe to breath that air. But the rate of cancers that have attacked those people was and is astronomical. We’ll never know if that false claim of safety was due to a lie or ineptitude.
I saw the trucks, loaded to their tops with the rubble and the tiny pieces of what had been normal, breathing people. I saw the purple bunting over the entrance to Hook & Ladder Company 8, the Ghostbusters firehouse, the one nearest Ground Zero. They lost 33 of their company on that cruel day.
I saw the pictures and posters taped to every light pole, every traffic sign, every surface that would hold them. Every one read some version of, “Have you seen . . . ?” Clearly, they were posted by people hoping their loved one had amnesia or got lost or were injured and perhaps someone could call the posted phone number to say where to find their dear one. But by the time I visited, the missing were completely and forever lost.
Candles burned on the sidewalks because . . . were they intended to be votive candles? Yahrzeit candles? A flame of hope? Something to grasp when there was nothing? Somehow they were connected to the posters those weeks after the attack, this in a vain effort to deal with the loss.
The only sound was from the heavy equipment, the trucks and front end loaders that belched their thick diesel exhaust. No one spoke. The traffic cops didn’t blow whistles and the few cars near the protective fence moved slowly and quietly. Everyone felt the holy.
I walked north on the way to meet a friend for dinner and heard in my mind’s ear Todd Beamer’s last words to his fellow passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93. “Let’s roll.” And they did. They stopped the hijackers from crashing that plane into the Capitol Building by instead crashing it into a field in Shanksville, PA. That selfless act is the stuff of heroes.
The Other Part Of The Story
Brace yourself, because this is a shocking turn from the story of loss, sadness and honoring. It is, however awful, the truth.
President George W. Bush, the frat boy, have a beer with him president, was warned by our intelligence agencies that an attack was likely imminent. After the attack his national security advisor Condoleeza Rice wondered in an interview how anyone might think it would come in the form of commercial airliners. The way they could have known is if Bush had listened to our experts who told him about that possibility. But he ignored the warnings. Then this got worse – perhaps worse than 9/11 itself.
Bush lied, claiming a connection between secular Saddam Hussein and religious extremist Osama bin Laden and parlayed his elongating nose into a full assault on Iraq, a country that had done us no harm. Later our CIA people tracked bin Laden to a cave at Bora Bora and asked for help to smoke him out. Bush refused the help and instead began a full assault on Afghanistan to root out the Taliban who had hosted bin Laden and his al Qaeda thugs.
The result of all of that was:
Hundreds of thousands killed or wounded
Millions displaced, people who migrated to other countries that don’t want the refugees
Instability throughout the entire region
The complete waste of trillions of dollars
The loss of the longest war in American history
Thousands of new graves at Arlington National Cemetery
Bush’s ineptitude, his dereliction of duty, created the set up for Trump to ignore the Afghan government in Kabul and negotiate instead with the Taliban in order to withdraw American troops. He set a date certain for all troops to be out and watched as the Taliban failed to meet any of their agreed upon duties. Then Trump lost the 2020 election and dumped this steaming, stinking pile of crap in President Biden’s lap.
Biden postponed the withdrawal for several months and then fulfilled our part of the agreement with the Taliban. And he did a horrible job of it, failing the necessary security for the military exit and, possibly worst, failing to evacuate the Afghans who served us as interpreters, guides and more. We had promised to protect them and their families and then left them to be hunted down and killed by the Taliban.
Every bit of that and more lies at the feet of President George W. Bush for his failures and his murderous dishonesty. Yet somehow we’ve allowed him to avoid accountability. He spends his time in luxury, painting terrible portraits and he doesn’t have the patriotism or backbone to speak out against those who would end our democracy.
That’s what happens when we send an incompetent frat boy to the Oval Office. It works pretty much the same when we send an incompetent, fraudulent circus side show barker.
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There is plenty to remember about 9/11. It’s more than that beautiful blue sky that day and the outrageous killing and the heroism of our first responders and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of police and firemen and women from around the country and even from foreign nations who showed up using their vacation time and their own money to help.
We are the survivors – even those who weren’t born yet. We are called upon to remember.
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– Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 2016
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Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
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Kirk Bangstad is an activist and the owner of Minoqua Brewing Company in Northern Wisconsin. He is fighting an ongoing battle against far right wingnuts who are trying to put him out of business, this solely because of his activism. Like Trump and MAGAs everywhere, they are using our system of democracy to destroy freedom and democracy itself.
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