President Obama has declared today as a day of Public Service and Remembrance. That is an interesting concept. I serve by writing this blog and supporting candidates who make a positive change and, hopefully, will get us out of the wars we have entered. In terms of remembrance, I remember how the tragedy of 9/11 was used by the Bush Administration to go after Iraq… something we never had to do.
I read in Mother Jones this morning an article on how 9/11 should be remembered and I give you this extract:
After 9/11, it could all have been different, profoundly different. And if it had, there would have been no children imprisoned without charges or release dates in our gulag in Cuba; there would have been no unmanned drones slaughtering wedding parties in the rural backlands of Afghanistan or the Iraqi desert; there would have been no soldiers returning to the U.S. with two or three limbs missing or their heads and minds grievously damaged (there were already 320,000 traumatic brain injuries to soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by early 2008, according to the RAND Corporation); there would not have been a next round of American deaths — 4,334 in Iraq, 786 in Afghanistan to date; there would have been no trillion dollars taken from constructive projects to fatten the corporations of war; no extreme corrosion of the Bill of Rights, no usurpation of powers by the executive branch. Perhaps.
It COULD have been different… but it wasn’t.
To really remember 9/11 now, and to provide the greatest of services, we could move as strongly as possible toward getting out of the military commitment to the civil wars of the Middle East and toward reestablishing the Rights and Freedoms for all classes that made America great.
We could.
We could.
Oh, how we could.