If there ever is a day that deserves to be somber, today is the day. Hard to believe that it has been six years since that horror filled day. The survivors and the relatives of those who had lost their lives all gathered to commemorate the day. The pains in their eyes, tears, and sobbing shoulders tells the story of the ultimate loss, of a pain that seem unsurvivable, a loss that is indescribable. The news outlets run about busily to capture the encapsulating moment, touch, or look, the one act of tenderness, grief, or confusion which - to them - neatly and tidily sums up the day. But it is to no avail, no amount of gestures can summarize the tsunami wave of emotions of the day.
Jarringly juxtoposing on this day is the testimony of General Patraeous and Ambassador Crocker at the senate chambers, swiftly and feverishly disguising an undisguisable civil war with spin. So we have on the one hand a day marked by brutal and searing pain in New York, Pennsylvania, and DC, while at the same time we have clones saving their own hides along whatever is left of the least of our presidents reputation, such as it is. God, if he exists, has usurped the Lenny Bruce sense of irony and unleashed it on this day.
Perhaps the day in 2001 is still too close to us, perhaps the facts have yet to be consumed, digested, and regurgitated. For I yearn to see and understand something profound that has thrust forward in the ensuing six years, but I look into a void. Perhaps I am looking - like the news outlets - for a summation, a piece of brilliance which, if not explain it all, can make it all seem less convoluted and wrong.
It must be good to live the life of a simple mind. Facile explanations and dogmatic recitations of shopworn and trite pronouncements roll off their memory effortlessly and fall easily into their mouths, the cognizant mind need not participate. As I sit and hear Bush, Giuliani, and Bloomberg mindlessly, numbingly recite the neocon tautologies, I get a sick and sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, the speeches are reminiscent - so familiar are they that I can almost recite them by rote- of facist and communist dogma. I hope the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue does not sleep well tonight. I hope he lays awake tonight in a pool of his own sweat, realizing with immense shame of the massively wasted opportunity and good will that he has wrought after this day six years ago. I hope he feels the pains of the many who died young and hopeful while at the beck and call of the weak and feeble leaders of our nation in service for a cause that is neither noble nor relevant to those events that happened six years ago today I doubt his all will bother him. Single celled creatures have no conscience or feelings about the lives of their fellow men. Drunk frat boys are not capable of self examination.
