Obligatory Post Too
It has come to my attention that today is the tenth anniversary of when those unpleasant terra-ist people flew those planes into those buildings and killed a bunch of Americans.
Like every other blogger in the world, for some reason I think this calls for a comment.
My comment is: Get over it already.
I don’t disrespect the people who died in that unfortunate incident, nor to I belittle the heroic work done by rescue workers, cleanup crews and hosts around the world in the days immediately following.
But to focus on those 3,000 deaths is to disrespect and belittle some much more serious problems. A casual survey shows that motor vehicle accidents, Alzheimer’s disease, influenza and diabetes each kill more than ten times as many Americans every year, and cardiovascular diseases kill more than three hundred times as many Americans every year. And that’s just American figures, not worldwide. These are real tragedies, going on around us all the time. Somebody do something, please!
Don’t pretend that 9/11 was such a big deal because it was shocking. It’s no surprise that a lot of people hate America, and many of them have good reasons for doing so. It is a little surprising that they actually succeeded in crashing not one but two of those planes. It doesn’t seem like a hard problem to prevent that, and it doesn’t require any of the ineffectual and invasive crap that has been going on in airports over the last ten years.
The American response to the terrorist attack ten years ago was wrong, and I said so at the time. Instead of saying, “Fuck you, you don’t scare us”, y’all just scurried away and hid under your security theater and foreign military meddling covers. You let Bush hand the terrorists their victory on a silver platter, and that victory was that their terrorist act worked. You got all scared and voluntarily sacrificed your own freedoms – the very things that once made your country great – for a thin illusion of security. It would have been inspiring and admirable if instead you had deliberately and explicitly rejected any responses that would have curtailed the rights and freedoms of Americans.
Anyway, I’m tired and rambling on. Instead of digging myself in deeper, what these people said.
