2010 - Oceanside, CA
I have heard persons lament how that, eighty years from now, Americans will have forgotten the tragedy of 9/11. Life will have moved on, they say. As with Pearl Harbor, we will honor such infamy with aggrandized, albeit poorly acted films or garish History Channel retrospects. Otherwise, the event will have all but passed from its present meaningfulness to our collective conscience. I must doubt this projection. For reasons which put fire to my skin even to write of, I am lead to believe there will not be forgetfulness of the tragedy any time soon. The fall of the Trade Centers was no doubt a horrendous loss of life, worthy to be mourned and commemorated; however, I presume the more awful legacy of that destruction will be that it signaled the collapse of our National sense of security; it marked the fall of unquestioned individual privacy and mobility. Great towers toppled, and with them plummeted something of even loftier height and consequence: the sacred American presupposition of innocence and freedom for citizens of this Country.
Out of the rubble of 9/11 and the wake of paranoia which followed, has been erected an immense unconstitutional framework for unwarranted surveillance and prosecution by agents of the United States Government. A gnostic eye has been opened upon any and every person, under the guise of "preserving security" against the omnipresent bogey of 400 million potential terrorists.
The nature of terrorism is such that any person may participate with a minimum of resources and experience. Thus all persons might be suspected of the crime, if only the charge is levied with secret phone calls or undisclosed emails. No obligation exists to require the sources of accusation to be named. A new and more fearful McCarthyism is upon us. The mere assertion of affiliation with terrorist plots is enough to strip citizens of their "inalienable right" to trial before a jury of peers. Suspects may be held indefinitely, so long as military or bureaucratic officials deem a person "potentially threatening." So-called "enhanced methods" of torture, previously anathema to the American conscience, are now legally sanctioned upon those unfortunate enough to fall under scrutiny. No law requires the detention of persons suspected of terrorist intentions to be announced publicly.
Opponents of freedom have seized upon the traumatized American psyche to usurp limitless means for silencing the voices of any deemed threatening or inconvenient to those who wield the power of accusation. Whether this political weapon of mass destruction has yet been wielded against Americans to the degree it was in the despotic hands of Stalin, Mao, Pol-pot, or Hitler, there is no doubting such absolute power is set and ready for the fist of new tyrants, waiting to seize their moment. For fear of terrors unknown, America has authorized her civil and military protectors to kidnap, torture, and capitally sentence with inscrutable power; in essence, she has exchanged her several foreign threats of terror for an ever-present army of domestic ones.
Though the American Republic had for a long while been waiting the execution of her sentence for abandoning most ideal principles of justice and reason, the recent attack against the Trade towers was a visible severing of the head of Democracy founded in freedom and presumed innocence. It was the death-fall of the Noble Experiment from the gallows of puerile fear of the unknown. I am convinced that unless this abuse and usurpation is countered and repealed, and the unjust scepter of abject power wrested from the darkened hand of those who fist it, generations of Americans will come to remember September 11th as the day which precursed their existence under the stifling shadow of an unseen regime of inscrutable tyrants.
© Michael Spotts:. 2010
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