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September 05, 2003

Keeps Me Warm*

I'm not the only one who is still mad about watching 3,000 of my countrymen and assorted others perish in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, a Pennsylvania field, and the Pentagon:

Angry? Almost two years later I’m still f*#king furious about it, if you want to know the truth. I’m not sure what emotion these people want me to have. An appropriate amount of sadness mixed with an appropriate amount of shame mixed with a soupcon of perspective and a dram of self-hatred? Can you send me the precise recipe, please? Because from where I stand, I see the two forces I thought the left deplored: religious intolerance and fascism. Together at last! Swirled into one cone! If Kluxers had flown planes into the UN building, these people would be insisting that America was bubbling over with millions of Bubbanazis, and the failure of the networks to mount Second Anniversary specials would be proof that the media secretly embraced the White Power agenda.

And why are we so pissed off?

Three thousand people died by design that day. Only a fool couldn’t help noticing what it meant: they want us all dead. They want a world in which my daughter is a slave - and even though they’ll never get it, they will kill someone else’s daughter a half a continent away just to make their point. They want a world in which there is no US, and the Bosnias and Rwandas are not only commonplace, but proof that their god is ascendant.

Sorry, but I have no plans to forget or forgive that atrocity. Indeed, life does go on, but those of us with rather sophisticated brains (say, above the level of the average dog) are capable of holding multiple thoughts and motives in our head at one time. I can live my life, love those I love, and still seethe with anger everytime I see the words "Taliban" or "Al Qaeda" scroll across the bottom of the screen, or when I see Palestinians celebrating that yet another innocent civilian has their insides smeared across the twisted wreckage of a city bus.

Maybe in happy-happy-hippity-hoppity-bunny-love land where so many on the far left seem to live, they don't really want us dead. It's all our fault anyway. They were just trying to make a point. They're not so bad after all. They're just misunderstood. Well, when we or the Israelis track them from the air and blow them to bits with a couple of Hellfire missiles, consider that our counterpoint. Consider the toppling of the Taliban just a plank in our platform. Consider the liberation of Iraq nothing but a rejoinder to their marvelous line of reasoning.

We will, however, win this debate.

And while you're here, why not go check out Michele's 9/11 remembrance project, "Voices."

* One prayer to the deity of your choice for the person who guesses the reference from which I took the title of this post.