matthearn.com

I should start with the following caveat: everyone should be allowed to do their own mourning, in their own way. So if getting through September 11th requires you to listen to horrible Lee Greenwood songs* and wear an American flag shirt and assign blame, I shan’t stand in your way. Personally, I spent the day participating in two healing religious services, even though my skepticism about the existence of God remains strong. But you gotta do you, boo.

I’ve heard a lot of argument about whether the 9-11 perpetrators “won.” I guess it depends on your perspective; if you look at it from the specific standpoint of the guys who flew the planes, well, they’re dead. Not much winning to be found there. If you look at it from the standpoint of Al Qaeda, they are reportedly weaker than they’ve ever been, and it seems like a Predator drone is killing the #1 or #2 guy in that organization about every other week. But if you look at it from the perspective of America, well, let’s just say there don’t seem to be any winners. Let’s break it down:

• Safety. This has two actual components: actual safety, and the feeling of safety. By way of example, if lots of people in your town got concealed carry permits and started hauling around roscoes, studies indicate that your community will safer (or at least have less crime, which is admittedly not EXACTLY the same thing). But do you FEEL safer, knowing that everybody’s armed? Probably not.

  
  So first, do you feel safer? I don’t, particularly, although I also know the answer to the other question. If you think that the extra measures at the airport, the Department of Homeland Security, and various wars and police actions make us safer, well then I guess we must be safer, right?

  
  Here’s the problem, though: given the number of folks who sneak across the border every day, how hard do you think it is for a determined person to get into the United States, particularly if he only intends to stay long enough to make himself a bomb vest and blow up a shopping mall. I’m still amazed it doesn’t happen every other week (like it does in the various countries we’re attempting to democratize). I don’t think we’re one whit safer than we were 10 years ago. Possibly less so, since as a country we’ve made a cottage industry out of blowing up other people’s actual cottages, which seems to piss them off a great deal.



• The economy. We all know it’s for crap right now, and as long as the Republican Party has a say in governing the country, it’s likely to remain so. And admittedly, the failures that kicked off the current recession were not 9-11-dependent. I wonder if the bottom might have been a little shallower if we hadn’t had to drop trillions on defense, though.


• Prosecution of perpetrators. This has been completely screwed up from the beginning, and isn’t getting better, because we treat 9-11 as a declaration of war. I’ve got news for you: a couple thousand guys living in caves in Pakistan can’t declare war. They are not a nation-state. What they can do is commit crimes, for which they should be prosecuted and punished. If you can’t get to them because they’re being shielded by the country they’re living in, that’s another matter; I didn’t have much of a problem with going into Afghanistan for this reason, and it sucks pretty bad that we can’t go into nuclear-capable Pakistan to do the same thing.

  
  This has all been said before, I’m obviously not breaking a lot of new ground here. But I still feel like elevating terrorists to the level of an actual country by declaring a “War on Terror” emboldened them a hell of a lot more than any war protest. Terrorists are criminals, no matter their aims. Treat them that way.




*I posted on Facebook about how much I hate “God Bless The U.S.A.” I stand by it. It is completely insipid, and painfully manipulative.


If tomorrow all the things were gone, I’d worked for all my life.

And I had to start again, with just my children and my wife,

I’d thank my lucky stars, to be livin’ here today.

‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.


You probably wouldn’t have healthcare, of course, so good luck with that.