Another Anniversary

Seven years ago on 9/11 our vows were confirmed. We, for better or worse, were wed to terrorism and every year we celebrate that anniversary. Every year we are bombarded from multiple sources about what that union means.

Tomorrow there will no doubt be plenty of photo Ops for the presidential candidates. Obama and McCain will reach deep down and give what their prospected constituents will agree as emotionally pure yet firm speeches about the war on terror, how all the victims and their families will not be forgotten, we are all united because of 9/11, etc….
The network news anchors who will probably be broadcasting from the site of ground zero will tell a poignant story about a survivor or a family who lost someone. They will tell us about the ongoing rebuilding process. One of the survivors may even be standing next to one of the candidates maybe even President Bush who will give one of his sideways across the stage nods in a good gesture sort of way.

The papers will have stories about survivors as well. Stories on the implications on the attack to Afghanistan and Iraq and the changes in airline security.
On top of the news, the conspiracy theories will be mass emailed. Perhaps in 50 years or however long it takes for documents to be unclassified we will get to the truth of what happened or more importantly what led up to those terrible events. But, this is America and its citizens will probably get a few hundred photocopied pages heavily blackened by a large tipped permanent marker leaving the document to read like a pile of vomited conjunctions.

I thought about this in the car ride to work this morning while listening to NPR. The story on was about how President Bush was going to reduce military personnel out of Iraq towards the final days of his term and then add more military personnel to Afghanistan. McCain thinks it is good as long as we have won the war in Iraq and Obama said it was too little too late and we should pull all our troops out of Iraq and bring them home. Obama goes on to add that he will if president deploy more troops to Afghanistan. When will the government realize that this particular war has no national boundaries. In certain ways the “war on terror” is more like the “war on drugs” than most any other war fundamentally speaking. The war on drugs has been going on for a long time, the rate it is going it will be the new 100 years war. The United States believes that it needs to use force when it can and this is where it fails. Force does not solve every problem and more than not leads to more problems.