Osama Bin Laden would crack a smile today.
America is terminally sick.
9/11 is only a surge of radiation to the system. Our country and culture have been staring at the microwave since the inception date. 21st century ultraviolence conceived by centuries of blood-stained history marks our day-to-day lives. We live in a fluid state of constant fear and resignation under the guise of freedom.
You thought we were better than this? Gunning down children seems like the natural progression of a culture that nearly exterminated and suppressed an entire population over the course of 100 years. The latest in the great human tradition of genocide but with an American spin. Blood dripping from the scalps of children on the saddle of the scalp hunters, government funded, tells a different story than the lies we grew up hearing and reading in history class.
For years, around 170 of them, people on the continent happily allowed the buying and selling of human beings and the separation of families. Rape, murder, pure brutality, This country is built on roads paved with unmarked graves. This is our story. Faced with the choice of the death of their sons or the abolition of slavery, you needed only the context of our past to realize there was only one choice they would ever make. The bottom dollar needed to be preserved because if you don’t have more money than your neighbor in America, you’re an outright failure. The fear of being lower class is the single driving factor for white American men, something to be avoided no matter the cost.
You think American foreign policy has been better than outright violence? Villages napalmed in Vietnam, guerilla troops funded in Latin America, every democratic election ever subverted by American interests. America doesn’t ever use the carrot, only the stick, the biggest stick on the block. The only white people that we ever dropped a bomb on were Nazi Germany, obsessed with world conquest. That was our lane, after all. And we didn’t drop a little bomb either. We razed Dresden to the ground. Absolute zero. Look what happens when you step to America. Absolute annihilation, ordered by the billionaire boys’ club and carried out by young men looking for help from the GI Bill. Only a tool in the great meat-grinder. Look at the choice given to the Japanese. Boys and girls whose end of existence is marked by an ash outline on a concrete wall. America will even bomb its own citizens, if they’re black, of course. See Philadelphia in 1985.
This is who we always were. The tumors in American culture were bulging out of our necks, hunching us over. Then 9/11 happens and we can finally embrace our true destiny. Suppressing our civilians via the Patriot Act, sending thousands of young men and women to a foreign land to fight the wrong enemy to protect a people who don’t want us there. Feeding the military industrial complex so people you never hear about can pay off politicians on both sides of the aisle with multigenerational wealth. At the expense, of course, of paralyzed and dead young men and eradicated villages and the bodies of children.
It’s a bitter irony that now the war on children and citizens has been brought home, to be wrought by our own flesh and blood with weapons we created. The United States, The Great Arms Dealer INC. For years and years the children civilians have suffered under our wars and regimes and institutions we’ve created, right-wing paramilitary groups we funded. The cancer of our culture has metastasized and spread and no amount of chemotherapy will fix it. No genuine change would happen as our leaders, like Joe Manchin, purged of conscious long ago, sit unaffected as the rivers run red with the blood of elementary school children, terrified and cowed under a desk. Say a prayer before you go to the store. This is America.
Shakespeare said it best.
These violent delights have violent ends.
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