the inevitable righteous indignation

I hope everyone appreciates my little beat poem to the last decade.

It was all I could muster after a day of chasing around 9/11 memorials with my pen and paper, dutifully taking notes as fathers and mothers and wives and children of the war dead all sobbed or held back tears stoically as they were once again trotted out for the annual grief fest organized to help them staunch wounds that they never should have had;

After a day of listening to speech after speech from leaders, elected and otherwise, about why were are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why 19-year-old soldiers came home exploded into pieces in little body bags, why the wars' disfigured roll themselves onto podiums to get medals of freedom, or honor or whatever;

Why there are terrorists who hate us, and how we have to stop them;

How this tragedy CHANGED US ALL FOREVER. And how we can never forget, ever, this event that we all watched on TV.

I hate this day. I doubt very many people like it.

It was a terrible day.

But when I watch guys on Harleys riding motorcycles for the benefit of the limbless, armless vet being pinned with an honorary medallion, and listen to twangy songs about kicking the terrorists with our American-made boots, and see the same determined vacuousness that emerged when the Sept. 11 attacks chiseled the nation from an ignorant, inert stone into a blind directionless god of war -- crying and cheering as it launched expletives and platitudes and missiles at the rest of the world -- I am particularly resentful.

I am not going to waste everybody's time talking about all the reasons why the start and continuation of two(ish) wars is wrong, or try to speak about my own, unique connection to this event, whatever it would be, as everyone seems to have a special and unique reason why they were touched by 9/11.

We all were.

Any thinking, half-conscious human being knows, feels, that death is wrong. And torture is wrong. And killing innocent, and even not innocent, people is wrong.

It is wrong.

But, somehow there seems to be a deep internal conflict between basic human empathy and the compulsion to blow shit up.

I have given up trying to convince people to change by telling them all the gritty details of wrong done to other people by our country, trying to waive about facts about torture and detention and civilian casualties, and young kids still barely out of high school being shipped to a war zone.

This approach has clearly failed.

So today all I want to say is just fucking stop riding Harleys for a half second, or singing God Bless America and the National Anthem really fucking loudly, and holding the American flag, or whatever flag, as if it could save you.

Just stop, and think of the most painful experience you've been through, and think about how you felt when you saw people falling from a burning building -- in your own country -- and how you would feel, or do feel, about your son or daughter or whoever coming home in pieces. And then fucking ask yourself how you, or anyone one, or any nation, can do that to someone else.

And if you're really happy to see them all get blown up anyway -- fuck you. I'm tired of this shit.

If not, maybe we should be coming up with a better way of dealing with this day than regurgitating mindless sorrow, and analyzing 10 years of failed military intervention, and vomiting our grief all over the world with an air of entitlement that we do not afford anyone else.

And maybe we as humans should try to find a better way to stop wreaking incalculable damage on people -- our own and others.

Thoughts?