Day 237 – The Day After 9-11

Sunday September 12, 2021

It was twenty years ago today…

And a day.

What a day yesterday was.

A day of remembrance and tributes.

A time to think of where you were when you heard.

But also a day to watch one of the greatest tennis matches in history.

It was the women’s final of the U.S. Open.

Two young women, teenagers, had defeated seasoned pros to ascend to this stage.

Two, three weeks ago, no one knew their names.

But here they were. Both born in Canada. One now claiming British citizenship.

Both born of immigrant parents and both having parents from different nationalities.

It gives one hope.

Maybe the world is changing?

I think about the women in Afghanistan who say they aren’t going back.

Will they succeed?

Will the Taliban try to govern in a reasonable way or will they try and force people to their extreme doctrines?

One can hope. It is said that the Taliban succeeded because they had twenty years of fighting the U.S. to learn what to do and not do. Certainly, they succeeded politically within their country. Once again, as in Vietnam, the U.S. experts and smart money were wrong. 

I read an article that said that Iceland had had a terrible rate of alcoholism, smoking, and drugs among young people. The folks in charge looked at what caused this and found that one could get the same stimulation from art and dance. So they implemented programs of art and dance requiring students to take such classes for a prescribed period of time and then the students could choose whether to continue. The rate of smoking, drinking and drugs plummeted. It gives me hope.

After 9 11 we had a time when we were all one, united with the world. We squandered it. 

Al Sharpton made a terrific point yesterday. He said the people who attacked us didn’t attack a particular race or religion, they attacked Americans. They attacked all of us.

Can we come together as a nation? As members of the human race?

Many are hoping the young people can do that. What can we do to help them? Give them opportunities and a stage. Support them. 

Moving on, I have a boffo plan to get us well. First, everyone must get vaccinated. I have a two fold strategy. First, develop local teams of people qualified to vaccinate within their communities. This is an expansion on my earlier idea of empowering the orange one as The Head Vaccinator and having him have people vaccinated at his rallies. Maybe, get the Proud Boys or The Oath Keepers to administer the shots. They are always looking to get physical. Why not?

The other fork of my two prong strategy is to isolate the unvaccinated and let them die. Put them in internment camps.

I know it’s a mild mannered approach but I don’t want to get too radical.

And a big shout out to Idaho. Way to go! They fired their chief health care guy with years of experience in epidemiology all because he told people to wear masks. They voted in a guy who calls getting vaccinated “needle rape” and wants to poison people with horse dewormer. The state’s hospitals are at capacity due to Covid with infected unvaccinated people. They are having to ration care. Telling people with life threatening problems, like cancer, that they can maybe make them comfortable while they die or better yet just go home and die. Many are going to Washington state for care. But isn’t this the Republican health care plan? Hurry up and die? One commentator said that what the state officials are doing is putting gas on the dumpster fire and then pressing their foot to the floor. (Double bad analogy.)

This isn’t stupidity. This is obstinance in pursuit of denial of reality.

But that’s the world we’ve created. Much of what we are seeing unfold is because one of our underlying unspoken principles is becoming false. I’ll call it “the good reasonable people principle.” I think lawyers have a term like this too. We see it in trials as “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But there is also a “reasonable person” standard. Unfortunately, we have left that idea of reasonableness behind. We have media empires built on the exact opposite – unreasonableness. There have been studies that show that anger is addictive. Once hooked you want more. You need to feed that monster and there are willing pushers. 

They get rich off of it. In Paraguay there are medicine shamans who will chant and cast spells over people dying of cancer. What do these same shamans do when they get sick? They go see a doctor, a real doctor. 

I’ve heard everyone on the Fox staff has been vaccinated. If so, they know the truth. They just don’t tell people because it’s not in their interest to do so.

We now have a Supreme Court loaded with unreasonable people. What will happen? It might take another twenty or fifty years to undo that damage. Have we reached a point where it’s too late? 

The chance of a bill to pass in Congress, a bill that everyone wants is thirty percent. A senator must raise $45,000 a day every day to have enough to win their next re-election. They spend 70% of their time raising money. When was the last time you saw or even heard of a Democratic and a Republican senator talk about how to solve a problem? I can’t recall it ever happening. 

It seems we have tied ourselves in knots and we can’t figure out how to fix it. This will be the end of our democracy if we can’t or the generations after us can’t. 

Becoming inbreed is a problem. It leads to weakness and idiocy. Has this befallen our country? It seems so. However, when I see two young women represented by four parents of different national backgrounds competing for one of the biggest prizes in tennis, it give me hope.

PS Sunrise at Bantaey Srei temple near Angkor Wat in Cambodia.