Unity is Overrated

In the U.S., we recently observed the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It was the annual ritual of “never forgetting,” remembering how things used to be, solemnly wishing we still lived in a “9/10 world,” and talk of putting the boots in the asses because it’s the American way. Remember the heroes, remember the fallen, and all that. I’m over 9/11. Over it. It’s high time we put 9/11 on the shelf next to Pearl Harbor, where we still remember, but we don’t invest the energy of jingoes in it.

Most 9/11 anniversaries, I end up discussing the unity we had in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Usually, it’s because people ask me why I’m being “divisive.” One of the problems I have with this is I’m not sure we had any actual unity. As a parallel, imagine a buyer and seller haggling over the price of a used car, when they’re interrupted by the sound of gunfire one block over. Immediately, the haggling stops. The sale of the car has not gone away: it’s just pre-empted for a bit by something more pressing. That’s how I remember things after the attacks. We argue about a lot of silly shit on an average day, but after 0.001% of the population was killed in a single day, most of that silly shit just stopped mattering for a little while. We were looking around at each other in a daze of sorts, wondering what in the hell had just happened, and where we went from there.

I don’t mind remembering 9/11, because I don’t mind remembering history. I especially don’t mind remembering traumatic history, because I hope not to repeat it. Whenever the topic of 9/11 comes up, my #1 memory that still turns my mood to acid is how just 18 months later we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003. Depending on how old you are and how you align politically, you may or may not remember that Saddam Hussein’s WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) programs were used to drum up support for the war. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Condoleezza Rice, U.S. National Security Advisor, infamously said. U.N. inspection teams on the ground at the time reported finding nothing, and the argument du jour was “Should we give the inspectors more time, or go ahead and start the war?” (As an aside, whenever anyone suggests “going ahead and starting the war,” they’ve voluntarily ceded the moral high ground. War is evil, and is always – always – closely followed by misery, atrocity, retribution, and human rights violations.) We went ahead and started the war. The Pentagon now tells us we succeeded in killing 4411 US troops, and wounding another 31,951. According to the Costs of War Project by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, we lit $1.7 trillion on fire in the process. Here’s the worst part: all these figures have a “so far” caveat attached. The actual cost of a modern war never really stops growing due to interest payments, disability claims, and other long-term concerns; and the Pentagon’s casualty counts don’t include veteran suicides since then. The casualty counts also don’t include the upwards of 224,000 Iraqis that perished, and there’s no metric available to quantify the strategic blunder of creating a Middle East power vacuum that ISIS has skillfully leveraged. What did we find, for all that? We found exactly what the U.N inspectors told us we’d find – nothing. Oops. Maybe we should have given the inspectors more time – or better yet, believed them when they told us nothing was there.

Normally, I say all this without naming names or administrations, in the hopes I’ll avoid people reflexively discounting me because of politics. It doesn’t work very well – these observations are frequently taken as a political statement anyway. That’s fine. It is a political statement, and I’ll get right down to it: George W. Bush was a witless, incompetent jackass that abrogated his policy-making authority to the Project For a New American Century crowd. Yes, I know Democrats in Congress voted for it, but none of them possessed the single-handed authority to put the brakes on that train wreck like President George W. Bush did. I hope the ghosts of Iraqi children trouble his sleep for the rest of his life.

“But what about the unity, maaaan?” I get asked most years. Which unity? The fake one where we were all shocked into stupor for a while, or the one where shrub had a 90% approval rating right afterward? I’m sorry, I can’t fake my post-9/11 stupor. You see, unfortunately I’m not a very good actor. I’m also unwilling to retroactively condone (or be silent on) a course of action I feel was absolutely wrong, both strategically and morally. You see – here it is again – I don’t want this to happen again. (Yes, I’m aware we’ve done it before. In spite of being such a negative bastard, I have this stubborn optimism that we’ll eventually learn from our mistakes.)

It isn’t comfortable to have deep-seated disagreements with people we otherwise love and believe to be reasonable. I feel this just as much as anyone, but I cannot sacrifice my principles on the altar of unity (or “unity”). Hopefully you feel the same way about your principles, even if they’re not the same as mine. You will never hear me say anything about the Iraq war other than some variant of “We were lied to, and it was a colossal mistake.” I will always blame our Commander-In-Chief at the time, because he could have stopped it, and did not. I will never blame Islam itself for terrorism, anymore than I blame Christianity itself for clinic bombers. In the words of the great modern philosophers Hatebreed: Sometimes, standing for what you believe means standing alone.

Unity can be a good thing, but not when the madness of crowds has taken hold, and we’re marching resolutely in the wrong direction. Next year, when the anniversary of 9/11 rolls around again, you may hear my annual counterpoint again. If you trouble me about unity again, I’ll refer you to this post again. Deal?

Never Forget

It’s just a matter of hours now until the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Sure enough, the sentiment “Never Forget!” is cropping up all over again. Just like last year and the year before that, it confuses the shit out of me. The 9/11 attacks were a major event in American history. Of course we’re not going to forget. Of course. Why do we rush to reassure everyone of this same thing every year?

There are lots of events that we’ve collectively “never forgotten” that don’t get nearly the same press: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that dragged us into WWII, Woodstock, Watergate, the shootings at Kent State, the Great Depression, Kennedy’s assassination, Challenger exploding, the OJ Simpson verdict and ensuing riots, the anniversary of Kurt Cobain offing himself, Mt. Saint Helens’ big eruption, Timothy McVeigh blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building…just to name a few off the top of my head. Really, any event where people reminisce by saying “Where were you when you heard the news?” Never forget! Well…no. Naturally, not.

Every year around this time I’m tempted to post snarky comments on Facebook making fun of the never forgetters, something along the lines of a status that says simply “Never forgive!” There’s also this nifty knock-knock joke that I ran across a few years back that I thought was funny:

“Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“9/11.”
“9/11 who?”
“YOU SAID YOU’D NEVER FORGET! *sob*”

I don’t, though. I don’t do this because I’m afraid of genuinely offending people that I genuinely like. I worry that this could cause deep enough offense to end a friendship in real life, and that would suck. I don’t want that.

Hey look, I was just as rattled by the 9/11 attacks as everyone else was. I didn’t know anyone that was directly affected, but I distinctly remember the feeling of deep fear casting its shadow into my soul. Especially in the first 24 hours, nobody knew the full scale of the attack. There were rumors of more kamikaze airliners inbound over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. What was going to follow the airliners? A hostile foreign power’s blue-water navy? Military aircraft dropping ordnance? Nuclear-tipped ICBMS? Were we in for a full-scale invasion?

With the benefit of hindsight, we know now it was “just” four airliners, and thank God the one that was (presumably) headed for the White House is the one that slammed into a Pennsylvania field. I remember feeling vaguely ill for the next 12 weeks or so, still trying to process what had happened, still grieving. I’m pretty sure we all went through similar feelings, so I don’t want to make light of what happened that day, but I feel like it’s not healthy to keep dwelling on it. I fully understand the anger and the sorrow, but one way or another we have to let that shit go or it’ll eat us alive.

9/11…the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can’t. I’ve coined another saying, based largely on my own journey that I like to pull out when I see someone nursing negative emotions out of a wounded sense of self-righteousness:

The important thing is to stay angry. Forever.

It’s sarcastic, obviously. No, staying angry forever is not the most important thing. In fact, I’d argue that usually, the opposite is true – getting over our anger is the most important thing we can do. When I hear people recite the “Never Forget!” mantra, I assume that what they’re really saying is “Never forgive! Never let go of the bitterness! Keep the wound open and give in to your hate!”

Maybe I’m mistaken. Maybe it’s just the way we’ve collectively chosen to remember this grim anniversary, but it confuses me a great deal. That day hurt me just like it hurt everyone, but I’m a relentless smart-ass. It’s in my DNA, I can’t help myself. If you see me joking around about it on Facebook…please don’t unfriend me in real life. Thanks.

mjw