The national shame of our response to 9/11: Two wars, economic meltdown, Palin, etc.

Twin Towers burning (AP Photo/Hiro Oshima and Sept. 11 Memorial Museum)

George W. Bush accomplished one thing in his presidency better than he accomplished anything else: He made us into a nation of frightened, narcissistic, gullible imbeciles.

I’m not talking about the conspiracy theories regarding the genesis of the collapse of the Twin Towers.

I’m talking about our willingness to work, eat, sleep and play under a seven-year false alarm posted over highways, broadcast in the media, and seeping from pore to unsettled pore in Homeland Security’s alert system, thankfully abandoned by Mr. Obama.

I’m talking about our national inability to honor the interests of anyone else, from the unemployed to the uninsured to the uneducated to the immigrants who still, bless their little souls, think of this once-free nation as the land of opportunity.

I’m talking about those of us who would fall for and hungrily fall upon the tripe being served up by the world’s worst political short-order cook, Sarah Palin, about “death squads.”

Any of us might say, “But I never paid attention to those dumb alerts.” Or, “I’m in favor of health care reform, and I’m fine with the immigrants.” Or, “If you say my name again in the same breath with Sarah Palin, I’ll certainly punch you out.”

But it isn’t enough. It is too late, of course, to rebel ? to demonstrate, to write letters, to vote dumbkopfs out of office ? regarding those ludicrous “traffic lights of terror” invented by the recently repentant Tom Ridge’s Homeland Security (Zeig Heil!) Department.

We are still suffering. How much damage to the national psyche that exercise in government-perpetrated terror has wrought it would be difficult to tell. But we need to do something to overcome it. The fact that we were faced, before that exercise in mind-control ended, with the bone-chilling, confidence-destroying economic meltdown and the still rampant malfeasance of banking and credit is not helping. What will? Darned if I know. Perhaps a return to the church or synagogue of our choice, as long as it’s not the wingnut/fire-and-brimstone variety, but one actually based on the age-old teachings of the Judaic masters and the once nouveau rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps getting some good old cognitive therapy, or starting self-esteem groups, or groups to read self-help books. Maybe find a guru like two old friends of mine in Richmond, the Rev. Dwight Smith and the Rev. Thelma Baker Smith who teach love, the agape kind of love, above all.

But we must do something. Ethically, failing to begin a repair (not a facelift) on our battered and abused psyches is unacceptable.

As for our narcissism, it’s time to reach out not with a gun but with our hearts. The two wars are wars of mentality, a damaged mentality that thought chasing an incredibly wealthy, sick-unto-death self-made mullah through the mountain passes of a nation so fragile in its spirit that it had traded Russians for the Taliban of its own accord is not the work of a sound spirit.

It is the work of a deranged mind.

Making up a plausible excuse to depose, most violently, a deranged dictator halfway around the world is not the work of a mentality bent on leading a nation. It is the work of a mentality bent on bringing that nation to its knees from the inside. It is the work of a deeply self-centered mind, a deeply uncharitable mind. It is the work of a mind, not a heart or a spirit. Evil? Perhaps. Very, very sad and very, very stupid certainly. But we allowed it to happen. We did not force Congress to stop it before it started; we have not unelected all those whose idea of saving America from what is, viewed logically, a force so much smaller and weaker than we used to be. We are all to blame for:

• The two wars that have ravaged two foreign nations and our own
• The economic meltdown
• The continued selfish bashing of immigrants
• The refusal to acknowledge that in this world, universal health care is neither a right nor a privilege. It is a necessity in the world we ourselves have made with longer life expectancies that should not be the reward for getting rich, which is often a matter of dumb luck, but rather the expectation of all people born into a world where surgery and even some pharmaceuticals can do miraculous things. It can do them for all, not just those whose bodies are draped in designer clothing.

Drinking the kool-aid of the studiously ignorant rightwing, exemplified by those who think Sarah Palin has anything to offer except disaster wrapped in a “Republican cloth coat” as Richard Nixon might have said, is counterproductive in the current universe. Certainly, dozens if not hundreds of political commentators have attempted to reveal the hollowness (at best) and viciousness (most probably) under her insupportable claims and attitudes.

But still, there are those whose vision of the America of the Founding Fathers’ ideals is blocked:

• By their own dedication to the idols of capitalism as it never was and never could be,
• By hellfire religion (as it unfortunately has often been no matter who or what it destroys) and
• By their belief in the common man (defined not as the ordinary man, but as one whose ideals and desires are common in the sense that the word is used to describe a rank horse, for instance, and exemplified by the buffoonish posturings of George W. Bush), rather than the magnificence of all humankind.

Those of us who can see the facts must understand that we have allowed these three deadly beliefs to hijack our national agenda, and our national soul. The opportunities in all three for the sort of jingoism that attracts children and idiots are rampant, and we have done nothing effective to attract those children and idiots to courses of action more in tune with:

• Enlightened capitalism (which will borrow from other systems to be effective rather than ideologically pure but ineffective)
• True spirituality (which uplifts mankind and embraces all beliefs and all believers), and
• Reverence for mankind, whether common in either sense of the word, exalted, or something in between, like most of us.

I don’t have the answer, except, for myself, to continue to write and write and write and write until, perhaps, one light bulb goes off in one head. Until, even if that person doesn’t agree with me, he or she at least decides to examine what he or she does believe. With luck, the result will follow an ethical and humanitarian tradition that can be traced back to Moses, through Jesus of Nazareth and expanded to secular humanism, and to the wealth of uplifting spiritual practice of all world religions.

One thing is certain. This nation was a global laughingstock when we battered Bill Clinton over his very human straying from the Biblical straight and narrow (although if you actually read the Bible…). This nation was pitied when its Supreme Court delivered an election in a free country into partisan hands for reasons that escape me to this day. This nation was globally supported when it was abased by a cowardly, if deadly, attack by ignorant adherents of the worst parts of an antithetical culture. And then that support was squandered and we were reviled, more than ever before, when we engaged in a tit-for-tat that has been nothing but destructive. Repeat, nothing but destructive. On any level. Except for oil. And that, too, is the fault of us all. What we accept, we condone.

In honor of 9/11’s victims, from those doomed people on the planes and in the towers, on the ground searching for remains and removing the reminders of disaster and then dying years later of inexplicable ailments, it is time to stop this nonsense. It is time to own our humanity, our mistakes as well as successes (of which we have had far too few since Jan. 20, 2000), and get down to the business of leading the world, sanely and compassionately. We each must do what we can, or we are as doomed as the Twin Towers, and we shall fall just as hard.