This. This, right here.
For The Record: We should have built them back, on the exact spot, just like it had never happened. Not left a gurgling pit of remembrance, up the street from a mosque. Their precise restoration would have been a far more fitting memorial than would a hole in the ground. The twin holes should have been radioactive craters in Mecca and Medina. With a list of the next 20 locations to be forever expunged published and promulgated worldwide, pour encourager les autres. Ask Carthage how that worked.
Today, I remember and mourn the departed from that horrible day, as the last Americans to live their entire lives, until the last desperate hour or so, in something akin to freedom, never knowing or imagining the nannyist police state our homegrown terrorists in our own government would emplace in the aftermath of actual terrorism. And because many of the victims did what real Americans do: they ran into burning buildings, to help their fellow citizens. They took on serial killers with rolled up magazines and butter knives. They died as a sacrifice to a bloated bureaucracy that had grown stupid, fat, and complacent, and wholly abrogated its mission to preserve liberty, and then turned around and made it ten times worse in the aftermath for the free people, rather than the perpetrators.
And that’s it.
The endless wars in service of the military industrialist complex, the serial rapes of the Bill of Rights, the demagoguery by an endless conga line of liars, cheats, and thieves, I give no thought of whatsoever.
It’s another anniversary for me. That day, that very morning, twenty years ago today, was the first day I was employed to work in the Emergency Department. I’d been a nurse for six years, but spent most of that as the medic on motion pictures and television shows, but having decided that wasn’t why I became a nurse, decided some weeks earlier to return to the hospital, and get into the game, get paid for what I was worth, and make an actual difference, instead of merely doing my best to make sure my services were never needed by watching over the pampered playthings of the studio industry.
I had finished all the b.s. HR classes the previous week, and was driving in to work from 5:30AM PDT that fateful Tuesday morning to begin my first shift in the world’s busiest E.R. About halfway to my first day at work, the first plane crashed into the Towers. Bound to the limitations of radio, I assumed it might have been another overcast day, and some wandering pilot had clobbered the skyscraper, much like the lost pilot who had done the same thing to the Empire State Building decades before.
Shortly before arriving at work, the second plane hit.
I needed no one in officialdom to confirm for me that we were, at that point, being hit. Two collisions isn’t a coincidence.
…So I’ve spent most of my professional career with the entire nation at war. I helped train nurses and medics who later deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, again and again, because U.S. big-city trauma centers, at that time, were seeing more gunshot wounds in a month than the Marines saw in the first six months in Afghanistan, so such centers were the keepers of the keys to how to do trauma medicine right. Until endless tar-baby retarded slogfests over there turned into an orgy of maimed and shattered people, from IEDs from here to Hell.
I watched as liberty turned into a police state, rather than common sense precautions. We should have known how wrong and how badly this was going to go, when instead of depriving the terrorists over there of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we did it instead, Japanese Internment Camp levels of wrong, to our own free citizens here. And then doubled down, every single time. Our leaders never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
I watched another generation of vets become the new Vietnam vets, used and abused, for nothing, and discarded both en masse and one by one, in return for giving arms, legs, and souls to a pointless effort, because some jackass thought we could impart democracy to people who can’t even read, and then twenty more thought that gender and perversion and whiteness were more important enemies to fight than people willing to fly airplanes into buildings in service of their 6th-century way of thinking.
As one bitterly accurate brilliant wiseass put it this week, we spent two decades, trillions of dollars, and thousands of wasted lives, to replace the Taliban with…the Taliban.
Only government can fuck up something so simple in so colossal a way. It wasn’t hubris, or anything so complex. It was purely and simply what happens when the stupidest, most evil, and most power-hungry incompetent and corrupt people in the room have been given the keys to the machines for 40 years, non-stop.
Okay, that’s excerpt aplenty, and the truth is it still ain’t even half of the masterful work Aesop has laid down for us today. In my estimation, this one is nothing short of his best ever—which is saying something. You absolutely MUST read the entirety of it. If you don’t, you’ll cheat yourself out of something truly, truly marvelous.
Aesop, buddy, with this post and the one preceding it, you have now officially usurped the Angry Guy Of The Blogosphere™ throne I occupied for lo, these twenty years. In retrospect, I now realize that I was in reality not a monarch but a mere regent. Now that the rightful King has arrived at last, I hereby cheerfully yield my position with no rancor or hard feelings on my part, pledge my undying fealty to His Majesty, and wish Him nothing but the best on His ascencion to the throne. May His reign be a long, happy, and blessed one, both for His loyal subjects and Himself.
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