Monday, May 02, 2011

STILL AND STRANGE

Yeah, of course I remember life in suburban D.C. in those awful days and months following 9/11, that horrible feeling of looking up, looking around, squinting into the beautiful blue sky, waiting for the next attack. 

Not that we had to wait long, because the attack came from within.  Osama Bin Laden and his associates surely knew that the attacks on the Twin Towers, Pentagon and wherever the fourth plane was supposed to hit were only the first step.  Sure enough, paranoia on a massive scale erupted, and we as a nation were all too willing to surrender our civil liberties, to support a baseless war, to do whatever in the name of...what?

What was the goal?  Was it to get Bin Laden?  Because if it was, why the hell were we in Iraq?  Why did we do half of what we did?  Why...Ah, forget it.  It's four AM, I need to get ready for work and Osama Bin Laden has been stopped at last.  Yes, we know he was more a figurehead than anything else, and we know his associates are still out there, plotting revenge.

There'll be a sequel, in other words.  But at least, for now, the story has an ending.