A Word From The Future: I am not exactly proud of this piece. I'm a better nerd/humourist than I am a political commentator. Not that I'm good at being either of those two particular things either. By which I mean, I certainly didn't need to be so callous about, well, any of this.
Remember Osama bin Laden? A truly evil man, but also, Baby Bushie's excuse for launching wars that, for the longest time, actually had pretty much nothing to actually do with him? The fella whose first name sounds similar to our incumbent President's surname, a fact pointed out by right-wingers as if it has relevance to anything at all? Remember how it used to be notable every time he released one of his little student films about how America is bad? Remember how he kinda faded out of the news? Well, he's in the news again. By being dead.
My first memories of the 9/11 attacks are actually garbled - my mom had news reports on, whereas I was still asleep, though conscious enough apparently to hear just enough of it to dream a big, surreal version of what happened. Upon finally waking up and seeing that, hey, something vaguely like that dream happened, I recall being....unshaken. I was 11 at the time, and was already sinking into the sort of depression that just made me feel numb to things, unemotional and unexcitable. It's one of those reactions that, in retrospect, tells me that my depression was getting really bad at the time. Hugh Laurie recounts concluding that he had a problem with depression while participating in a charity demolition derby in 1996, upon realising that he was actually bored by the proceedings. "Boredom is not an appropriate response to exploding cars." It's also not an appropriate response to exploding buildings. If it took a national tragedy for me to realise that I had a problem, and start working toward fixing it, then.....well, that's pretty much the worst way to make any sort of positive realisation. I would've preferred going without.
It's true what the right-wingers say, though. 9/11 changed everything, thanks to the terrible, terrible efforts of aforementioned right-wingers. Following that fateful day, this nation erupted into a sort of arrogant self-righteous patriotic fury we hadn't seen in several decades. News stations *coughfoxnewscough* happily handed over airtime to some of the most wretchedly extreme right-wing folks out there. Because these folks were on the news, the nation thought, their views were legitimate. And we began scapegoating both an entire race and an entire religion. And, hey, while we're at it, why not scapegoat liberals and, well, anyone who supports basic civil liberties! Not since the days of slavery, perhaps, was the dumb American stereotype so hard at work to make things thoroughly awful for everyone. Hell, they're still hard at work, with the "Obama = Muslim = Terrible" line of logic being, well....not as uncommon as it should be. And we'd better brace ourselves for a lot more of this awfulness for, as we're already being continually reminded, the actual War on Terror is "far from over". So, pardon me if I'm not the most celebratory individual at this news. Certainly, it's nice to have one less extremely evil individual to worry about, but it doesn't undo what we, as a nation, have done to ourselves, now does it?
....also, congratulations on your re-election, Mr. Barack Obama.
No comments:
Post a Comment