Letters to the Editor
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Oops, I'm blushing SO badly now
Err, should have read before clicking publish.
Change, 2nd to last paragraph:
Authorities say, "Child pornographers are a $20B/yr business and only molesters mind us tracking everything they do online,"
To:
Authorities say, "Child pornographers are a $20B/yr business and only molesters mind us tracking everything ANYONE DOES online,"
Sigh. We now return to regular programming...
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Well said Joan
Like most others, US & non US I'm pretty 9/11'd out and thus avoided reading this article for a while. But it was worth it - a wistful listing of what else has been lost in the US besides those initial lives - opportunities, freedoms, thoughtful discourse, perhaps even, the USA republic.
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Anniversary Fatigue?
There is something unsettling about the phrase "anniversary fatigue." It rattles me.
The word "anniversary" conjures in me memories of candle-lit celebrations. Generally, it is a comforting word, a token of remembrance, a salutation -- a gentle, wistful smile of a word.
Used in connection with 9/11, the whole concept seems, somehow, unclean and inappropriate. There can be no celebration, no solace, no warm touch.
We all contemplate death in our own ways. We live with absence and emptiness, sometimes cursing and sometimes crying. We shoulder a burden, sometimes well and sometimes not. Some of us are crushed by the load. Others become emboldened and strong. But fatigued? No.
There is a sacred duty to loving those who have died. It can even become a kind of comforting ritual, but it does not have a day or an hour. It is worn like air -- everywhere, essential and unnoticed.
What is demanded of us in these public displays of memorial pomp is not reverence, not honor, not even allegiance. What is demanded is anger, hate and vengeance.
Of the annual stoking of these, I am indeed greatly fatigued.
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911 Changed Nothing- It just masked the sins of the GOP Mafia
Americans are like drama queens: they invest great meaning in and glorify the trivial at the same time that they trivialize and devalue the meaningful.
[Initial Clarification: It is not the intention of the writer to insult, or take issue with all of the people who suffered a personal loss as a result of the 9-11 traggic events and their aftermath. It cannot be gainsaid that to the families of the victims and others tangibly affected by the events of 9-11, that nightmare had for them great personal meaning; but to the country as an institution, 9-11 should have been treated as a relatively trivial event in our history-not a watershed.]
First the dramatized but really trivial events that have been glorified: We start with 9-11. Despite the bromide that everything is different after 9-11, the truth is that things are exactly the same, but for the changes caused by the actions we allowed following the government and media induced hysteria. The actual deeds of the people who committed the atrocities we call 9-11 have been revealed to be more like a run-of-the mill criminal scheme that happened to produce horrific results than an act of war against the United States. Think of a suicidal Ocean’s 11 type of operation were a small band of under financed individuals undertake a plan that was so improbable, and indeed ludicrous, that if you knew about every detail the day before, and took your story to a newspaper, not only would nothing be written about the plan, but the newspaper would not even contact the FBI. Here is the implausible story you would be relating: Four groups of less than 5 foreigners each, where no member had any real experience or training in flying sophisticated commercial air planes, nor special skills in martial arts or ninja training were going to hijack one plane per group using ordinary box cutters to overtake the crews and passengers, for the purpose of crashing the planes into buildings. Moreover, nobody in any of the groups had expressed any motive, and after the fact, no organization would officially take credit for the resulting catastrophe. This story would certainly convince the people at the newspaper that you were crazy because it defied human nature at every angle.
Without vouching for those who are advancing conspiracy theories that put the U.S. government behind the events of 9-11, it is at least worth noting they are among the few pointing out that there are so many missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzle that we cannot believe the official story promulgated by Bush & Co. (i.e., the Bush Administration and the Republican Mafia consisting of legislators and right wing polemicists) as being a fair explanation. On the other hand, there are some facts that do not fit into anyone’s jigsaw puzzle. For example, there is the fact that America’s most ingenious trial lawyers had reached the sad consensus that lawsuits against the airlines, the owners of the buildings or the government would not be likely to succeed, yet the normally tort-recovery-adverse, penurious Bush & Co. (when it came to recognizing civil claims of ordinary citizens) rushed to establish a huge federally financed fund that generously bribed victims to not sue (and thus preclude them from using the powerful litigation tools of discovery to gather facts about what really happened). Another odd shaped fact is the resistance of Bush & Co. to any investigation of what happened along with the mainstream media’s acquiescence of inexplicable delays, even after the victim’s wives obtained a commitment that there would be an investigation. Then there was fake anthrax scare where the substance was identified as having been made in a United States government lab, but nobody was convicted; and the whole thing became like a skit we recall from Gilda Radner playing Rosanne Rosanna-Rosanna Danna.
And then Bush & Co. worked us into a dramatic frenzy, and we cheered as we watched embedded reporters regal us with stories of how our troops vanquished the hapless Taliban without a single causality at the hands of our foe (although we killed a few of our own), followed by the phony “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq.
Now lets turn to the trivialized and devalued meaningful events that are considered water under the bridge. The sins of omission (or commission)of Bush & Co. in allowing 9-11 to happen, their blundering foreign and domestic polices, their partiality to the super-rich and the election they stole with a corrupted, Republican Mafia majority on the Supreme Court were forgiven and they were granted absolution by half the country and the mainstream media. Why were they given the free pass by half the country and the MSM? Because Bush & Co. convinced half the country and the MSM to trivialize the meaningful and glorify the trivial.