[September 2006 journal entry]
This past Monday marked five years since the 11 September 2001 plane hijackings that led to thousands of injuries and deaths when New York City’s ‘Twin Towers’ collapsed and the Pentagon was severely damaged. I grieve for that day’s victims. I also grieve for the thousands upon thousands of victims for whom the Bush administration and their champions are accountable. I still stand by the objection I voiced against the Bush administration’s immediately casting the 11 September 2001 tragedies in a language/imagery reminiscent of the medieval Crusades and calling for a misinformed Congress to declare war with imprecise wording easily manipulated by the Bush administration. I still stand with those who supported exhausting the potential of casting the 11 September 2001 tragedies in the language/imagery of criminal behavior. With the language/imagery of criminal behavior, might the perpetrators of the 11 September 2001 tragedies have been marginalized rather than galvanized/lionized? might Osama bin Laden et al have been captured? might the Taliban in Afghanistan have been completely eliminated? might the ‘cells’ of likeminded criminals in this country have been exposed? might Iran have been restrained? might an international unity have been sustained? might the New Orleans calamity have been admirably managed? might . . . ? We will never know. Instead, the Bush administration drank/pushed a poisonous mixture of foolish/careless ‘neoconservative’ political ideology and ‘fundamentalist’/‘evangelical’ Christian theocracy that necessitates a ‘Crusades’ language/imagery of war. Is there another ‘renaissance’ on the horizon?
