A change of tactics
I like many if not most Americans that can remember 9/11 will do so for the remainder of our lives. However, this year for the first time, I will not dwell on it. I don’t need to relive the pain of that day to remember. I don’t need to sit in a corner and cry. I don’t need to recall the funerals that I attended, several with empty or near empty coffins.
I couldn’t forget this day if I tried. I documented a lot of my own personal post traumatic stress disorder last year, when a lot of bad feelings came rushing back after the terrible accident that took the life of Yankee Pitcher Cory Lidle.
Admittedly, I tend to try and point out what it wrong NOW, since 9/11 on this day. I have pleaded with the people in Washington and in the news to just stop with the fear mongering and playing with our emotions. I like others (and documented quite nicely this year by Newsweek) wonder why 6 years later, there is still just a whole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood.
But as I sit here this evening, looking at the lights reaching into the cloudy evening, lights meant to represent the buildings that once stood there, the people that lived and worked there, and the rescue workers that perished, I am angry. After the WTC bombings in 1993 it was known that there were issues with the FDNY radios communicating in this area due to the amount of steel and such. The “fix” was so flawed that they could not get it to work properly that day and did not use it (9/11 Commission: Chapter 9 ). USA Today first reported in 2003 that the money from the Department of Homeland Security is not going where is should. I found it interesting and infuriating at the same time, when I read this article in Newmax that showed GOP leaders complaining about too much money going to Democratic areas, as if that should have any impact on where the money should go. The response from this… more politics. Just last year, the DHS slashed the funding to NYC by 40% because it determined that New York City has no National Monuments or icons.
So now, as I look forward, rather than spending my time dwelling on what was, my focus is more to how can we deal with it now? It is time for each of us to stand up and demand that we stop playing games in the name of security, and to actually have something done about it. We need to make our elected officials actually put together something meaningful in the way of a plan. Let me stress that again… MEANINGFUL. I don’t feel safer because airport security is “so perfect” that they make little kids take off their flip flops and walk barefoot through the x-ray machine, since they obviously can’t tell by looking that a 99 cent piece of rubber can’t possibly hold the explosives to take down a jetliner.
We deserve better. And I for one am going to start demanding it.
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Yes, it’s rather annoying that the grieving process for this American went all the way back around to anger again. That should have been the 2nd or 3rd stage, not the last.
So much for government of the people, by the people, and for the people.