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11 September, 2001: "Everything Has Changed"

By Alexa

Confessions of a skeptic follow . . .

Seven years ago, after the terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda in the United States, George W. Bush stated that "everything has changed" - a phrase often reiterated by him, his advisors and staff, his supporters to the present day.

I didn't understand on that dark September day that Bush's statement wasn't just an observation, or an announcement, but a self-fulfilling prophecy and mission statement for the United States.

Everything has changed because political opportunism and the PNAC agenda ("what we need is a new Pearl Harbor") have been seized and used to embed fear into the consciousness of a nation.
I mourned the deaths of the 3,000 plus who lost their lives on 9/11/01. But I weep for the more than 3,000 dead American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the hundred thousand Iraqi civilians killed in a war of attrition, and believe that torturing teenagers is the very definition of terror.

Do you remember what you were doing, where you were when you heard the news on September 11, 2001?

I didn't lose any loved ones or friends, and knew no one who was injured in the terrorist attacks. But I was nonetheless furious that day and in the days that followed.

I remember vividly the eerie quiet of no planes flying overhead. I remember taking Amy to get new shoes at the mall the next day and feeling oddly exposed, wanting to get her out of a large, open public area as quickly as possible.

You see, I believed everything George W. Bush said. I even believed Mayor Rudy 911ani. I was so naive then. I'd just turned 21 and was busy with grad school, being a single mom, working as a substitute teacher. There was no time for reading for pleasure, or the luxury of politics or blogging.

I believed just about everything of The Official Story then.

And now, I doubt just about everything except the known facts; the fact that these events occurred. (Although I'll fess up about The Pentagon being a huge question mark in my mind, based upon the physical damage, discrepancies in The Official Story and Rumsfeld's eerie ESP . . . "ten minutes from now, it might be The Pentagon.")

These days, I'd put myself into a subcategory of Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP), only because a) the attacks, from my reading, required that a couple hundred people failed to do their jobs on that day and that day only (although this is in question because I just don't believe a secret could be that well-kept by that many) and b) I wouldn't put anything past the miscreants in office.

I don't know what happened, and may never know.

But I do know the proof that "everything has changed."

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on September 10, 2008 (boomark / email).