It’s been seven (7) long years since Osama Bin Ladin (with a lot of help from the incompetence of President Bush and his band of merry Cheneys) pulled off the single largest foreign attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, and the greatest single loss of civilian life in our history. In all that time, Bush has failed to capture Osama, and indeed, deflected military assets from capturing him in order to prepare for his illegal, immoral and failed war against Iraq, a country that was not responsible in any way for the 9/11 attacks, and did not pose a risk of imminent harm to our country, nor was it likely to for the indefinite future. A war and occupation that has made us less safe, destroyed our international reputation, harmed our relations with our allies, increased the terrorist threat against our nation and allowed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup and regain control of much of the territory of Afghanistan, the country where Al Qaeda was based and where the 9/11 terrorists received their funding and training.

Yet, the media still parrots at every opportunity the right wing talking point that the Republicans are better qualified to protect this country from future threats to our national security, and far too many Americans believe that to be true. So if 9/11 didn’t change everything, apparently it did change one thing: the truth no longer has any meaning when it comes to our political discourse, which has never been more divisive, more based on hatred, more divorced from reality than at anytime since the days of Joseph McCarthy and the Communist red scares of the early days of the Cold War. This political campaign season is just more evidence that the real legacy of September 11 is the failure of our political system, our leaders (in both parties), our news media, and ourselves to uphold the ideals of human freedom, human liberty and human rights to which we have long pledged our allegiance and our sacred trust.

In short, 9/11 exposed the American dream in the 21st Century as a black hole of lies, deceits and, frankly, cowardice on the part of millions of Americans. We allowed fear to overrule the better angels of our nature. We let that fear be exploited by the worst political opportunists, war profiteers, human rights violators and lovers of tyranny and authoritarianism in our nation’s history. In the process we permitted these evildoers to take control of our government, eliminate our Constitutional rights and safeguards and turn our collective vision of this nation’s greatness upside down and inside out. We have abandoned every moral principle and surrendered our liberty to a gang of murderers and thieves in exchange for a promise of security they never intended to keep.

The lives of those innocent victims that were lost on that fateful day were sacrificed for nothing of any value. Until we elect leaders that reverse the terrible course of events which have played out on a daily basis for the past seven years we should remain ashamed of ourselves, and what we permitted to happen in our and their names. The murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the ethnic cleansing of millions more. The adoption of torture and the prosecution of aggressive war, both crimes against humanity, as official American policy. The trashing of our Constitution. The domination of our politics by fear, corruption, incompetence and disdain for the American people.

I pray one day we can look back on these terrible years and say 2008 was the beginning of the end of the reign of terror by the enemies of our republic, both those who are our external enemies and, even moreso, those of our country’s internal enemies, who have done far more damage than all the terrorists of Al Qaeda could ever have dreamed of achieving with their evil and senseless acts of violence.

I hope that someday soon we will look back on this year of 2008 as the beginning of the end of our national nightmare, and the renewal of the America we all idealized as children, and which we have always fought for and worked to bring about. That is my great hope for this country I still love despite the myriad flaws in its character these last seven years have exposed. That is the hope to which I dedicate the remainder of my life as an American citizen. Until that hope is realized, however, I cannot and will not be proud of what we as Americans have let our nation become in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.