It Never Ends

Twenty years now, 

Where'd they go? 

Twenty years I don't know 

I sit and I wonder sometimes 

Where they've gone 

And sometimes late at night 

Oh, when I'm bathed in the firelight 

The moon comes callin' a ghostly white 

And I recall 

I recall 

(Bob Seger) 

Here we are again, revisiting September 11. Historians refer to the 20th century as the most murderous era ever. It began peacefully enough and with widespread hope that the old nationalistic hatred of the 19th century was over and the machine age would liberate humanity and we would soon enter a paradise on earth. It lasted until 1914, when an anarchist threw a bomb that killed an Archduke and set the world on the treadmill to war. The earthly paradise was shelved. 

The 21st century didn’t give any of us much time to make predictions. There were still plenty of scores from the 20th century to settle waiting in the wings. We were caught napping, drunk with unprecedented prosperity and the illusion that we were insulated from the barbarisms being perpetrated elsewhere, many of which were inspired by our meddling in other countries’ conflicts. The victims of the terror attacks in Manhattan, Washington DC and Pennsylvania weren’t the ones who had it coming to them. It was their ultimate misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The government sworn to protect them let us all down that day, but those people especially. We were carelessly going about our lives in a free and open society. Our government, that was put there to pay attention to threats and neutralize them, shit the bed. 

I miss the world that came to an end that morning. 

Into my heart an air that kills 

From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content, 

I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

And cannot come again. 

(Housman) 

But we learned nothing on 9/11. Our response has been an unmitigated disaster. George W. Bush was the worst possible person to have been president at that moment in history. His winning the election was quite possibly one of the factors that led to it's execution. Bin Laden knew he would overreact massively, which he did. Joe Biden finally ended the Afghanistan intervention (while Dubya complained about its implementation), by simply pulling the plug. There was no graceful exit strategy. Comparing it to Dunkirk was actually somewhat justified, since Dunkirk was itself the worst "strategic withdrawal" in modern history. But now that it's over - but for the shooting - what do we do now? 

Closure – the sense of an ending – is for works of fiction. In life the only closure is the coffin lid.