Is Terrorism Making You Sick?
Sure BushCo has reamed the planet in the two years since 9/11. Question is, what about you?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, September 12, 2003
Oh great, so here you are, two full years later.
Two full years after the 9/11 maelstrom and two years during which the term "hero" has been molested and slapped around and "patriotism" has been smashed and reconfigured into some mutant shellacked Maria Shriver-like perma-saluting mannequin, a conservative plastic surgeon's wet dream, all fake smiles and bleached teeth and Botoxed worry lines and pumped-up, silicone-enhanced flag-waving bravado you no longer relate to in the slightest.
And yep, sure enough, the world, as promised, has never been the same. Not one single heartfelt notion of large-scale, tangible peace and unity and tenderness among nations, no true sense of stunned, sad coming together in the wake of tragedy has managed to survive, has made it through the warmongering onslaught of the BushCo juggernaut. Nice time to be an American, really.
Do you remember? The days immediately after 9/11? That rich feeling of global sympathy and sincere concern and this powerful, overarching sense that maybe, just maybe, if we work together and reach out to each other without snide bias or prejudice, we can re-make the world in an entirely new, politically purified, blazingly conscious, peace-seeking vision? No? It's OK. Neither does anyone else.
So here we are, the biggest deficit in U.S. history and the worst interstate financial crisis since the Depression and millions more people without jobs every day, the environment and independent thought and your civil liberties slowly being hacked away as more money is spent on our barbaric Iraqi occupation this year than on U.S. education. Ahh, patriotism.
Oh yes, rest assured, we learned a great deal from 9/11. We learned paranoia. We learned simmering dread and mistrust. We learned balled fists and WMD lies and how many Iraqi and Afghani civilians can be reduced to bloody cinder by a single Tomahawk missile.
We learned to hate France and Germany and almost all dark-skinned foreigners and detain them without reason or explanation or lawyer.
We learned to tap more phone lines and secretly check your credit cards and email records and sabotage our own well-being at every turn in the name of some draconian "Homeland Security" BS, as Ashcroft just snickers quietly and anoints himself in holy oil.
This is where we are. We are the world's rogue superpower, attacking without provocation, launching war without a true enemy, not to be trusted in the slightest, our international U.N. standing at its lowest level in 50 years, the most embarrassing and inarticulate, spoon-fed president in decades.
Depressing stuff indeed. But wait, what about you? Forget BushCo's reamings and Cheney's hateful sneer and Rummy's black eyes and the fact that Disney AOL Time Warner Microsoft ExxonMobil owns everything you see and hear. What have you done, in yourself, since 9/11? Is that a viable question now?
Ask yourself this: Have you invited all this bile and hate and fearmongering in, let it fester and take control? Have you buried your head in the quicksand of bitterness and ennui and godawful reality TV and Fox News spitting its lopsided hate-filled worldview in the face of a numb nation?
Have you taken 9/11 and its subsequent flurry and fury of sadness and antagonism and outright hate and let them dictate your life, run roughshod over your id like an SUV crushes a bird's nest?
Or have you maybe used these karmic batterings as markers, as further inspiration and motivation to turn inward? Can we ask this now?
Have you maybe, just maybe, used these atrocities to look to yourself for the answers -- or at least, for the right questions -- as you realize no one else will provide them for you, not the dogma of vengeance, not self-righteous religion, not a guru or government or a war machine that so obviously doesn't care a single whit for your individual spirit or well being it might as well be an Enron CEO.
How do you choose to engage the world now, from the trauma of then?
How do you choose to view the tragedy of 9/11 today? All überpatriotic and wistful and acidic, more than a little angry, eye for an eye goddammit let's get those bastards and make them pay c'mon who's next bitch you wanna piece of America well come and geddit boom crash kill?
Is it, in other words, a grand and bloody excuse to avoid looking inward? To avoid confronting the root causes? To take an honest look at your beliefs and ideas and core Self, at the very thoughts that shape the world around you?
Because this is what 9/11 is, was, and all it will ever truly be. An opportunity. A staggering and unprecedented chance to re-evaluate where you, where we, where the planet is truly coming from, and where you want to go from here.
And it no matter what they tell you, no matter how many bogus Orange Alerts and no matter how many tapped phone lines and presidential pleadings for tens of billions more of your tax money so we may continue to pulverize another ragged nation into submission, this is what 9/11 still remains. An opportunity.
Its lesson is ongoing. Its lesson is perennial and recurring and it colors every major event in your life, every tragedy and death and birth and trauma and disease and wart and pimple and orgasm and breakup and fender bender and crushing failure and blazing success and long lonely godless night.
What's your choice? On what levels are you going to accept or reject this setback or that confrontation, this creative surge or that overture of love? What are you going to do with this ball of raw malleable energy in your lap?
Will you use it to work on yourself? To peel back the layers of your own BS, go deep and ask yourself the hard questions, what the hell do you really believe, with what sort of spiritual attitude and aggressive tone do you really want to go through this life? To what sort of symbol do you really want to pledge your true allegiance?
This is the only decision that really matters, the only choice that has any true power. Will 9/11 and every subsequent emotionally explosive event in your life result in bitter conflict and finger-pointing and bile, or self-discovery and personal opinion and raw compassion? It's that simple. And that difficult.
Choose the former, you are a proud lockstep American, accepted and nicely conformist and a happy member of the Bush-approved herd, ready to shop hard and suck down that paltry tax refund and defend the nation against those gul-dang liberals and gays and America-haters.
Choose the latter, and you are quickly outcast, shunned, radiating all by yourself, dancing to your own inner samba, smiling like a demon, godless heathen pagan progressive intellectual traitorous blasphemous slut that you are, as the establishment just scowls and adds you to its blacklist.
Because it all comes down to one vital question, really. All the pain, all the forced patriotism, the commemorative plates, the media blitzing and force-fed jingoism and BushCo viciously leveraging 9/11 for political and corporate gain, and you merely left hanging by bare emotional and spiritual threads, raw and naked and wondering just what the hell is happening to the world, and where did this handbasket come from?
It all comes down to this: Can you, on the deepest and most acute levels possible, in a raw and divine way that does zero dishonor to the various tragedies of your world but instead injects them all with mandatory doses of perspective and divine drunkenness and hot screaming love, can you, with every fiber or your being, with the deepest breath you can possibly take, laugh at the cosmic carnival of it all?
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