Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2003 > Two Years After the Attack
This week has had the most pleasant weather: cool nights, warm days, foggy mornings. This past Monday, while I was looking for my outdoor cat, I looked up to see the full moon and a still-bright Mars side by side in the southern sky.
With the clement weather comes the goldenrod, whose blooming all along the roadsides announce the coming of the fall.
My state's governor was struck down by a double stroke on Monday morning in Chicago.
The worst of the two strokes was a cerebral hemorrhage, the kind that killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. While the governor survived, he is in no condition to govern and probably won't be for the rest of his term of office. The lieutenant governor has already been named acting governor to finish out the term.
This isn't exactly the way the governor would have liked to bow out of office. But then, it's just as well. Our governor has had to preside:
With all this it's little wonder that the lieutenant governor refuses to run for governor himself next year. He'll have his hands full just keeping the state legislature from new spending next year.
It's been two years since the Muslim attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
So far, only the Pentagon has fully recovered from its attack.
The mopping up of the World Trade Center is complete, and proposals for reconstruction include--incredibly--a new skyscraper. Of course, after what's happened nobody is going to pony up the money to build one. Meanwhile, with the massive loss of jobs from the attack, tens of thousands of New Yorkers have given up hope and left the city.
We are still in Afghanistan, mopping up what remains of the Taliban. And the government there is still too shaky to stand on its own.
We are now in Iraq. Having driven away Saddam Hussein, we are now trying to bring order of the chaos from his departure. The war there is still not over; and until Saddam is captured or killed it never will be. His sons may now by dead, but Saddam is no doubt still smiling.
Then there are the al-Qaeda and Wahabhi Muslim fanatics filtering in from Sa'udi Arabia to kill both Americans and Iraqis. Add that corporate manager (ye gods!) who barely runs the country in lieu of his military predecessor, and it's obvious that we will be in Iraq for a long, long time.
So now we have a war, complete with body bags and a massive military buildup. We will also have a ballooning deficit that heralds price inflation because, this time, the Japanese can't buy our debt as they did during Reagan's tenure.
Yes, we are still holding Muslims foreigners without trail, although not as many of them. Most have been deported.
It is now obvious to most that the Act of 26 October 2001 is too broad and injurious to civil liberties. Even some Republicans are calling for scaling it back. So the Attorney General is touring the country singing its virtues. (Why is it that almost all the Attorneys General since Robert Kennedy are authoritarian thugs?)
Visa restrictions have kept many scientists, researchers and students from other countries out of our national labs and universities. This is injurious to our national security: We don't have enough native scientists to replace them. Or want to replace them: our national labs have a reputation as poor work environments. And this is especially painful for the universities, since non-Americans are the majority of graduate students in the hard sciences, computer science and engineering.
This obsession with security is the mark of the risk-adverse, who is too attached to this earth and its pleasures, who is fearful of the death that comes to every one of us.
The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, who drove their hijacked airplane into the Pennsylvania hillsides rather than let it be flown to Washington as a bomb, could be a lesson in bravery and backbone to their softer citizens.
Knowing their doom, they fought the enemies of the human race and thus are truly heroes among us.
What a pity we should proclaim freedom, and yet at the same time throw it away in the name of security, all because of petroleum and the Domain of Islam that sits on most of it.