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| Twenty-Five Years http://forum.ectozone.net/viewtopic.php?t=851 |
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| Author: | Fritz [ September 11th, 2026, 7:23 am ] |
| Post subject: | Twenty-Five Years |
(I've posted this a couple times before; updated for obvious reasons) It just doesn't seem possible. In some ways, that warm Tuesday morning in September still seems like just yesterday. I was a "Customer Service Supervisor" at a retail store, which mostly meant getting cussed at because company policy means I couldn't give people cash refunds without a receipt. I was finally getting my first break, and nearing the door to the lounge--dodging the mess, because the store was undergoing remodeling at the time--one of the managers was saying something to one of the guys in sporting goods about "And now I heard the Pentagon just got hit". I had no idea what he was talking about... Then I got into the break room and saw the television. The World Trade Center was on fire. I was stunned into silence save for one gallows joke about "Well, at least this means they'll stop talking about Gary Condit for a while" (And if you can't even remember who Gary Condit is, that just sort of makes my point; he was the top story on September 10, 2001.) I saw one of the towers fall, and went numb. I couldn't process it. My fifteen minutes on break came up, and I went back to work. Within an hour, the store was almost deserted. When my shift ended, I joined the line to get my car gassed up--rumor had it gas was about to go to $5 a gallon, so get the $1.95 while you can. I sure miss that $1.95 gas. It really hit me that evening. I live about a mile north of Indianapolis International Airport's main terminal (until it moved several years later), and whenever we have relatives or other company who don't come from here, they often comment about "How do you get anything done with all the airplane noises whenever they take off?" Well, most of the time, we don't notice because we're so used to it. That evening, I noticed the eerie silence of the airplanes not taking off and landing. After the attack, the management set up a radio near the Service Desk and the Bob and Tom Show was on; they're nationally syndicated, but their home base is right here in Indy. Understandably, the canned laughter and jokes about Kristy Lee's boobs had fallen to the wayside. I remember Tom Grizwold commenting "What kind of twisted value system approves of something like this?" and couldn't help but agree. Maybe he meant Islam, but that's not what I agreed with. The "twisted value system" that caused that day is the supreme arrogance that comes from saying "My politics, the exact way I worship God, is so superior to yours that I consider you subhuman and unworthy of continued existence. And not only that, because you don't worship God in the exact same way I do, I will kill myself just to speed along your journey to Hell and mine to Heaven." The twisted value system that says crashing airplanes into buildings full of office workers is somehow a good thing. And let's be clear, it's not an Islam thing: that same twisted value system tells a Good Christian Soldier it's okay to blow up a federal building with a truck bomb or to go into a church (a church) and open fire on a doctor who performs a medical procedure you don't like, or to shoot a congresswoman you disagree with in the head, and take out a bunch of others in the process--including an innocent child who would have celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday today. And in the aftermath, that twisted value system has only strengthened the worst of our political leaders. Compassion, empathy, tolerance, education, intelligence, an understanding of science and history--in this twisted value system, these things are liabilities. The Twisted Values crowd rallied around the mush-mouthed dry-drunk who was sitting in a classroom struggling with "My Pet Goat" when the attacks were made. They cheered when he tortured people and invaded a country that had nothing to do with the attack, because they were scared and didn't even mind when he tried to take their Social Security away. But later the Twisted Values crowd really fell in love with a literal game show host, an openly racist thin-skinned bully who couldn't open his mouth without bragging about how awesome he thought he was. This rich New Yorker was a "great businessman"...who'd bankrupted casinos, just about the most legal form of ripping off customers as there is. And somehow, in the eyes of this twisted value system, this incandescently unqualified buffoon who said creepily sexual things about his own daughter, threw children in cages, and had priests teargassed to do a photo op is the greatest president ever!!! That this man who embodies every one of the seven deadly sins is somehow God's chosen agent on Earth! They so embraced this twisted value system that they filled the internet with the shitty fan fiction and later AI slop where this corrupt incompetent who walked in on underage girls in dressing rooms and was best friends with a convicted pedophile is actually a wildly popular superhero fighting corrupt, incompetent pedophiles, who all happen to be the politicians who opposed him. There were moments of light. The spirit of unity right after the attack. The shining moment in 2008 when it looked like the mantle of greed and mendacity was being cast off. In 2011 American soldiers finally located the fiend behind the attacks and shot him in the eye as he was jacking off in his not-so-hidden Pakistani compound. The resounding electoral defeat of the narcissist authoritarian in the 2020 election. But those moments passed quickly each time. The spirit of unity after the attack pretty much morphed quickly into "Yer wif Duhbya or yer fer th turrists". 2008 was followed by a racist freakout that tried to convince us that depicting the President as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose was a valid criticism of his policies. After the 2020 election the narcissist authoritarian whined about made-up conspiracies and refused to concede defeat, whipping up a mob of terrorist followers to break into the Capitol building with the purpose of assassinating Congress and his own Vice President in a desperate last gasp to keep his unearned power. When a deadly pandemic ravaging the world, the Twisted Values crowd refused to take the vaccine, screaming "My body my choice!!!" when it comes to wearing a simple cloth mask, while putting bounties on women who exercise their own choices over their own bodies. They would rather take horse dewormer and shit their intestines out because some guys on Youtube told them to. Incomprehensibly, the narcissist game show host came back. In the years after his presidency he'd been found liable for sexual assault. He'd been found criminally guilty of thirty-four counts of financial fraud. He was raided by the FBI for hiding stolen top secret document in his tacky golf resort's bathroom. While the country had been saved from the game show host's disastrous term all the news could talk about was how the price of eggs was still too high and how old and demented the current President was while the game show host, who was only a few years younger, constantly and incoherently ranting about sharks, windmills causing cancer, immigrants eating pets, and his friendship with fictional serial killer Hannibal Lector. So the game show host and his supremely weird running mate won. They ran on a platform of immigrants ruining America, all the while being fluffed by a propaganda network owned by an Australian, and once in office he let a guy from South America fire everyone in the government who wasn't doing something that personally benefited billionaires, or worse, slowed down the rate at which they got richer. Masked thugs now roam the streets of the country, kidnapping random people with a skin color darker than beige and sending them off to third world gulags to be tortured, and murder anyone--especially protesters--who get in their way. A dumb trade war has decimated American prestige around the world, alienated longtime allies, and crashed the economy. In an effort to cover up the files that would reveal more about his longtime friendship with a know pedophile, he fecklessly launched a war in the Middle East, because that's gone so well for the United States over the last twenty-five years. Hey, we really do have $5 gas! And the Twisted Values crowd still supports it all with the fervor of a cult. On September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked us in hopes of destroying us. They knew three office buildings weren't going to do it--it was what we'd do in reaction to the attack. And we pretty much did. Massive deficits incurred by three bungled wars and massive giveaways to those who were already wealthy beyond the point of obscenity. The same tortures we prosecuted Axis soldiers for after World War II performed by Americans at presidential direction. Children ripped away from their families and put in cages. Children. In Fucking. Cages. All while an increasingly demented obese draft dodger fantasizes about being a great military leader while golfing with his diaper nurse. And the silence in the "mainstream media" is just as eerie as the lack of jet takeoffs that warm Tuesday night. We shot the man who ordered the attacks on us. On the whole, he probably died pretty happy; if there is a Hell, he's looking up at us now and smiling--he's just about won. |
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