Remembering 9/11- Bye Bye Miss American Pie

It’s hard not to reflect on the events of eight years ago. We went to a BB King concert that night. I thought they would cancel it, but they didn’t, and we went anyway. Everyone was quiet. It was like a wake. It was a wake. I remember sitting through the concert thinking, “What am I doing here? The world had forever changed as we know it, and I’m sitting here like nothing had happened."

We lost our innocence in one day. We caught up with the rest of the world that day as a victim of international terrorism. We lost precious lives. In response, we lost freedoms in exchange for more security. We grew the government; created a new agency to manage our security. We passed laws taking our freedoms away, and we had the gall to call it the “Patriot Act”.

We invaded Afghanistan preemptively, and over threw their government. It’s been eight years. We’re still looking for Osama bin Ladin. We invaded Iraq. We overthrew their government- “Mission Accomplished”. We were spreading democracy. We made martyrs and grew new enemies and terrorists- far more than before. We managed to turn world opinion against us, when we should’ve had their full support. It’s understandable. Our belligerent actions made us an international pariah, not the savior of democracy.

We haven’t learned from our mistakes. Now we’re at it again- ramping up the troops in Afghanistan. We can’t even define our objective. It’s senseless. We seem to be numb to what is happening. The government says we could be in Afghanistan for many many more years, and nobody is outraged. We’ve spent a trillion dollars on our national credit card without so much as a whimper. At the same time, we stamp our feet and scream at town hall meetings about the cost of health reform, and show no empathy for the millions of people who suffer, or go bankrupt, because of the sorry state of our health care system.

We lost precious lives. We lost precious freedoms. We lost our innocence.