I have discovered, and am currently residing in, the tenth level of Hell. I am certainly not the original discoverer, being that I am at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport waiting to board my flight to Boston. We have already survived the lines at check-in and the TSA search points, and are now sitting in the boarding area listening to interminable repeats of various messages telling us what we must not do, and the consequences of doing so if we dare do it. This must be Hell, since only there would the guardians contemplate the verbal equivalent of the constant rock music the military used to flush Noriega during our infamous invasion of Panama.
I used to anticipate traveling. Airports were never the most fun part of the travel experience, but everyone approached the melee with good humor and high expectations arising from anticipation of their arrival at a desired destination. In their current incarnation, no one is in good humor in an airport anymore, primarily because the rules are endless and relentlessly negative, the personnel managing them – and you – are barely polite, and the specter of passage through the various checkpoints is daunting and stress inducing.
This unhappiness is a direct result of 9-11 and is more of a distraction than a true cost of that tragedy. The airport experience serves as a reminder, however, that 9-11 has cost the American people a great deal in the way of lost civil liberties, lost moral compass, and loss of prestige and trust among the peoples of the world. Anyone who thinks these things have not occurred has either slept through the past 7 years or never appreciated the value of what we used to enjoy during the time in which we enjoyed it. To receive, as I did, an email out of the blue from a Belgian friend with whom I have conducted transactions asking me what the American people could possibly think they are doing and asking for an explanation brings home just how much trust we have lost in such a short time.
America once had great reserves of trust built up in Europe and elsewhere in the world. It is a given that trust is earned and never conferred. Like all valuable commodities, it takes a very long time to create a positive trust balance, and, by comparison, it takes moments to squander the asset. We earned our trust through our performance in two world wars on the backs of the American citizen soldier and on major goodwill initiatives such as the Marshall Plan. We invested life, treasure and sweat equity to build a strong positive trust account balance, only to piss it away it in the aftermath of 9-11 due to the Bush Doctrine and the arrogant misuses of our power by Dick Cheney and his cohorts.
We didn’t have to give up our civil liberties by allowing the government to invade our privacy without benefit of warrants or other customary assurances of our personal liberties; we didn’t have to lose our collective morality by deciding, without benefit of hearing or representation, who our enemies were and incarcerating them indefinitely in inhumane conditions; we didn’t have to lose the trust of millions of non-Americans by suggesting that we were the only super-power and they had to simply accept it while we did as we wanted, “justifying” our actions as we went along through cynical morality plays no one really believed.
After 9-11, we could have done what Americans have always done in a crisis: get mad, get our collective will together, give those who have harmed us a good thrashing, and then go on about our lives as usual notwithstanding the worst they could do to us. Instead, our present administration told us to learn to fear and to be governed by our fears. The first evidence of this intention came in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 as George wandered aimlessly in Air Force One and Dick hunkered down in his bunker. The rest of us were left to try and overcome our grief and confusion by ourselves.
In my humble opinion, what we should have done after 9-11 – following a suitable interval of, say 90 days, to allow us to collect our dead and properly mourn their passing – would have been to have a National Finger Raising Day, whereby the collective body of the union would have been told to go outside at a communal hour and raise their middle fingers in the general direction of Osama bin Laden’s last known address for a 60 second period denominated by church bells. In other words, we should have told those at the top of the Al Qaeda pyramid that Americans weren’t afraid of two or three old men full of hate and hiding in their caves in the wilds of Afghanistan, and, if they thought we were, they were sadly mistaken. We should have advised them that they could expect a visit soon, and that “now” would be a good time to make themselves scarce (seemingly, they didn’t need that last piece of advice, but we should have told them that anyway.)
This would have been a quintessentially American response – unique and pointed, if you will pardon the pun. This would have been in the spirit of the citizen soldier and of the admonition that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Instead, we hunkered down and went into hiding and even developed color coding for perceived threat levels. I used to think a rainbow of colors was a good thing.
I am not arguing that there is no threat and that we shouldn’t look to the security of our ports and our skies; but let’s do it as Americans – proudly, honestly, and with our values intact. Sneaking around in order to violate our own and international law is not our way. Our court systems, if they had been properly used by the administration, would have easily processed the bad guys by now, and we would not have to be ashamed of ourselves for incarcerating so many without the benefit of trial or proper representation.
In short, we blew it. At least most of us did; those in United Flight 93 got it right. George, Dick, Rummy and the gang didn’t – they just used the tragedy as cover to further their own nefarious ends. They caused us to let those two or three old men succeed in their goal of making America change its ways. Those old men couldn’t stand the sight of liberty at work and play in disregard of their narrow view of the world, so they decided to punish and scare us. We let them succeed by changing our ways and abandoning our pride and morality – we hunkered down within our fear and color coded the level of its intensity for them to see.
I am still for giving them the finger. It is what they deserved then and still deserve today – that and the justice that still awaits them if we can ever manage to focus on their capture as we should have those many years ago.
