I realized sometime after the GOP convention in St.Paul that 9-11 was feeling a little different this year.
Maybe it was the shameless way the GOP kept trotting it out like an endless dinosaur rocker “farewell tour” meant to generate dollars and sentiment in that order.
Maybe it’s just been seven years and I have felt all the emotions I have to feel on the subject. As a DC-native and frequent visitor to New York and Pennsylvania I took it personally. I still do. Those were my places they attacked, my people who but for chance could have been murdered, my country.
My country.
Maybe more so then than now?
Tomorrow there will be the clip shows and tributes and moments of silence filled in places, Republican places, with nothing but cynical calculation.
“How much longer can we ride this thing? Will the rubes keep buying it? Can we pull one more off?”
To hell with all of them.
I’ve grieved for the dead, raged at the ones who let it happen while they were out chasing tax cuts and “privatization”, sat in awe of the heroes who dug and rescued and were abandoned when their lungs choked with toxic dust and they asked for help from the party that let it happen.
“No rescue for you, fire-fighter, cop, volunteer chump. Just shut-up and smile for Dear Leader’s montage!”
I’m played out on this thing. The same fools keep biting onto the same hook. They are ineducable it seems. Nothing the GOP does can shake their conviction that these are Their Guys, honest folk Just Like Them, who share their values even as their homes go into foreclosure and Their Guys shrug and call Their Brokers.
I’m over it.
Tomorrow I’ll go about my day. I’ll remember and try to avoid the worst of the GOP Vaudeville like stores that have their Christmas displays up in August.
Like Scrooge I’ll keep 9-11 in my heart all year long, not as the moment when we all came together but as the lost opportunity to rise above everything that had led to that day.
Fossil fuels? Still there.
Religious fundamentalism? Check.
Us against Them? Always, baby, always.
Observe or ignore 9-11 as you see fit, but I’m done.
The world is hot enough without me lighting one more candle.
