Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

10 comments

  1. ragekage

    Praying for them today, and every day, probably for the rest of my life.

    Times like this always make me think of the Navy hymn.

    Eternal Father, strong to save…

    Godspeed an godbless you. Gone but not forgotten.

  2. Chris Blask

    On September 11, 2001 I was in Toronto, Canada getting ready to catch a flight home to Utah.  Donna was at home with the kids and managed to get me on the phone and tell me what was going on just before 10:30 ET.  As I turned on the TV, the second World Trade Center tower collapsed.  As the day went on, I managed to get ahold of a friend in Manhattan and began to track down the friends and family who work downtown New York, my cousins who fly for American Airlines and United.  Before Donna and I got the phone I spoke to my five year old son, reassuring him that Mommy and Daddy and the big people around him would make sure he was safe.  By the following day I had found them all safe with the exception of my coworker Suzanne Calley – a person I only knew as a bright and ironic voice on the phone – who had been on the plane that struck the Pentagon.  I would later find out that she had spent the flight calling her friends and family saying goodbye.  Sitting next to her that day was a five year old girl.

    I had been dismayed at the end of 2000 when George Bush was elected.  He seemed like a charicature of a presidential candidate.  That day seven years ago, I, like most Americans, seethed and sobbed and stared at the sky in bewilderment and inasmuch as I gave him thought I placed my trust in George Bush to do whatever was necessary to address this.  To step up and lead us.

    As President Bush spoke to us in the days after September 11, 2001, I listened and I nodded and I believed in him.  As our military took the battle to Al Qaeda and the pathetic “government” that provided support to them, I willed them to succeed.  When President Bush made it clear that we would be taking on Saddam Hussein I hung my head, got a grip on the fact that it was unstoppable, and willed myself to provide what verbal and intellectual support for that action.  After enormous angst an indecision, I extended my trust in George Bush in 2004, hoping that the path that we had set ourselves on could still come to something that could be called a positive end.

    In the years following 2001 many of my thoughts for how we would succeed in these two efforts have been eroded away against the sands of events.  We did not, as I had hoped, follow up the initial destruction of the Taliban with a massive effort to make that country a stable counter-example for what it had become.  We did not, as I had hoped, follow up the initial invasion of Iraq with a massive effort to stabilize that country and demonstrate to its people that theirs could be a better future.

    We did not capture Osama Bin Laden.  

    We are still at war in Iraq.

    I place these failures at the feet of George W. Bush.  I looked to him to guide us from the days following September 11, 2001 to a time when we could feel safe, when we could be proud of our nation, when we could stand tall in the world as something other than the pariah the animals who flew those planes and their supporters thought us to be.

    He has failed us.  

    He has failed me, he has failed my son, he has failed my daughters.  He has failed Suzanne Calley.  He has failed the children who stood at Ground Zero today and talked about the parents they remember only as abstract figures from their earliest memories.

    Enough.

    -chris

  3. alyssa chaos

    rage is right. prayer.

    im not usually a religious person but in times like these, on a day like today, it seems like there’s nothing else to turn to.

  4. John Allen

    For what it’s worth, I think prayer is a rather ironic reaction to Sept. 11th. It was after all, the actions of religious fanatics. They were probably praying all the way up until the last second. I’d rather see humans seek human answers and solutions to human problems instead of offering words to an imaginary sky-being. Humans can work out human differences. The differences between gods is something else entirely. Leave that to the gods.

  5. Hollede

    but am now watching something called 102 Minutes that Changed America on the History Channel. It is traumatically riviting. I am in a sort of shock as I view the unfolding events.

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