(This post was, at least in part, inspired by Dr. Sid Schwab’s post about the 6th anniversary of 9/11. But I don’t need to link that, really, because if you’re a decent human being you already read Surgeonsblog. Plus I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately too. So there.)
I was watching Alias tonight. I’ve never seen the show, so I’ve been watching my way through the DVD’s as Netflix delivers them. Now, without a lot of context, Sydney Bristow getting carried away to a secret government installation, tortured, and eventually threatened with death is pretty SOP for that show. The fact that the installation in question belongs to the US Government only slightly more so. But the fucked-up part is that this is actually happening in real life, except the installation(s) aren’t secret, and (largely) neither are their methods.
Let’s think about post-9/11 life for a minute. Before 9/11, the government tortured innocent people and held them against their will indefinitely. They illegally snooped on phone conversations and Internet traffic. The difference is that after 9/11 not only do they admit it but the people openly sanction it via the Patriot Act and other various assorted Congressional actions. We give away these freedoms willingly, we endorse torture and convince ourselves that habeas corpus isn’t and wasn’t ever important. Inside our country, we’ve given away so much of our freedom at this point that Ben Franklin would probably just say “Fuck it!” and emigrate to Britain were he still alive.
We as a people have become worthless. Perhaps we were already, and 9/11 just acts as a magnifier for it.
And through the passive attitude of our citizens, outside of our country we’ve committed an infinite number of mortal sins. At the end of Falling Down there’s a scene where Michael Douglas’ character realizes that he is, in fact, the bad guy. Unless you’re the most innocent or most sociopathic of people, you can’t help but feel for him in that moment. He didn’t do anything really bad. He was really frustrated and finally just snapped. He was a good man once. He left a lot of blood in his wake, but really, those people he killed were all assholes and sometimes some people just need killin’.
We invaded a country under false pretenses. We killed an unmeasurable number of civilians, women and children. We spent months looking for weapons of mass destruction that our leaders admit now weren’t there. We started an unwinnable war, a holy war; bombed, murdered, and then declared victory. And we sent our own citizens to their deaths over completely false pretenses.
At what point do we realize we’re the bad guy? Where has our humanity gone? Why in the holy everliving fuck wasn’t Bush impeached on the fucking spot following the 9/11 Commission’s investigation?
Thing is, we’re the law, too. There’s no Robert Duvall to show up and tell us we’re the bad guy. And, this being the day after 9/11, there was no shortage yesterday of false accusations – apparently, you’re not a patriot or even a decent human being if you don’t support holy war. Guess that makes me a complete sociopath.
It is our lack of compassion, lack of understanding of freedom, mass adherence to religious dogmas, willingness to kowtow to any demand without quantifying its rationale, and willingness to exterminate a people that we don’t understand that is destroying us. The terrorists didn’t need to do anything after 9/11. They were smarter than we gave them credit for. They blew up the Towers and we took care of the rest.
At the end of the aforementioned Alias episode, Sydney is finally tricked into revealing her secret by the jailers torturing a cellmate in front of her. They figured her out: she didn’t respond to torture, but she would always respond empathetically. If we had a Sydney for every idiotic redneck fuck that makes “Let’s just nuke the Middle East into a big sheet of glass” remark, perhaps we could dig ourselves out of this shit pit.
It’d also be way easier on the eyes.