9-11 Nine Years Later: Introduction

Imaginationland

Lloyd: I'm only human, Harry! Come on! Stop being a baby. So we backtracked a tad!
Harry: A tad? A tad, Lloyd? You drove almost a sixth of the way across the country in the wrong direction! Now we don't have enough money to get to Aspen, we don't have enough money to get home, we don't have enough money to eat, we don't have enough money to sleep!
Lloyd: Well, it's not gonna do us any good sitting here whining about it. We're in a hole. We're just going to have to dig ourselves out.

Saturday marked the 9th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  

Today, nine years later, we're mired in two intractable and goalless wars, with several more potential goalless wars looming; the size, scope, and power of the government and particularly that government which does not serve the American people in any tangible way has grown out of proportion; individual freedom has objectively declined as more and more Americans acquiesce to a security state central reality; the culture war has had a second, or third, or fourth, or nth renaissance; we now have national debates about whether or not minority groups can be trusted to participate in social and economic life; our economy is in the worst shape it's been since the 1930s and projected to get even worse before it gets better; our military is extended, exposed, and weak, presenting a long-awaited opportunity for regional despot wannabes the world over as well as major players like Russia and China to make whatever power grabs they can; American soft power and cultural prestige has declined across the globe; we have betrayed our historic missions of nonalignment, plurality, heterodoxy, freedom, opportunity, equality, and peace; the average American has been exposed as - or has become - an uninformed, manipulated, fear-driven animal willing to sacrifice the most valuable things in the world in favor of emotional insulation from a cold and distant, imaginary and insignificant threat; our media is complicit as huge news conglomerations try to out-shock each other; even our best politicians prioritize rape-like soundbites over being reelected over getting pork for their constituency over representing the country that they have sworn to serve; and we have put our full civilizational capacity up in a total war against a nebulous, undefinable, undefeatable abstract noun.

This wildly undirected civilizational octopus reaches its tentacles out to grasp even the elements of being a human which have no bearing, no connection, no relation at all to establishing peaceful international relations.  Liberals, conservatives, moderates, radicals, the religious of all stripes, the non-political, non-believers, bankers, teachers, janitors, the unemployed, the old, the young, dead heroes and villains, and the unborn should be outraged, outraged because all of this was preventable, and all of this was the direct, objective result of checking our collective capacity for reason, analysis, dispassionate problem-solving, and justice at the door and entering the deepest nether regions of fear-driven collective tantrums and the darkest id.  

And we still haven't rebuilt the towers or captured bin Laden.