5:36 p.m. - September 12, 2001
mourning
I didn't write about the tragedy last night because I hadn't had time to think about it, and, as you know, when I write without having time to think about what I'm writing, I end up deeply regretting it. So.

I am not mourning simply the fact that terrorists have attacked the country I live in. It isn't only that tens of thousands of people were killed in the space of a few hours.

What angers me, what saddens me, is that I've been reading CNN's opinion polls on what people think about the tragedy and the aftermath.

66% of people polled think the U.S. should retaliate even if innocent people are killed.

Does this sound wrong to anybody else?

Terrorists don't like America, so they make their point by crashing into influential buildings and killing tons of people. We don't like the terrorists, so we drop bombs and such on innocent people from the countries the terrorists came from, leveling buildings and killing tons of people.

Since I'm fairly sure no government officials read this diary, I'll be up front. I don't blame other countries for not liking America. *I* don't really like America. Everybody's so shocked when someone says that, like it's unfounded and unheard of, but it's true. If it were human, I would never be friends with it. We're pompous and power-hungry, and we're fearless and mean. We think we can do anything we want to anyone we want, except possibly Russia, because we have a better defense system than everyone else does. Over the years, we've killed thousands of innocent people who live in countries whose politics and/or religion we don't agree with.

And then we turn around and are shocked when somebody does it back to us.

In the violent, selfish parameters of the time we live in now, we had it coming. In a perfect world, we all could have doen something else. Talked about it. Coexisted peacefully. But in this time, we had it coming to us.

Don't misunderstand me. I absolutely am not happy that this happened. I am absolutely not condoning the attack. I don't think anybody who died in these attacks should have died; there was no reason for them to die. This had nothing to do with them. Their families should not have had to suffer.

But neither should the families of any country, choose one, any one, that the U.S. has taken violent control over simply because of its enormous powers.

Bush calls it an act of cowardice. Is it, really? Would he himself have called it 'cowardly' to fly a plane into a building? Would he have done it for love of his country? I think it's much more cowardly of Americans to sit in their glass-walled bullet-proof offices and federal planes, sitting up high where you can barely see the bomb hit. It's detached that way. We don't know what we're doing, and I don't think anybody wants to know. We're content to distance ourselves, and now we can't do it anymore, and that's the real reason why everybody's so shocked. We've seen the other side for a brief moment, and it scared the shit out of us. What it felt like to be vulnerable, for a split second.

Bush is climbing up his ladder again, high on the power drug. We're all just little kids again, wanting to set things on fire and tattletale and get revenge. None of us can bear to sit here and let the terrorists, or even their home countries, get the last laugh. They're long dead, the ones who carried this out, burning in their suicide cockpit, buried in the remains of the Trade Centers, and we still can't let it rest. No, we have to 'show them who's boss', if you will, retaliate, declare it an act of war, kill people who had nothing to do with any of this, just as they did to us.

It's the power drug.

What is in our genes that makes us want to blow everyone up who's different or threatening? What's in our genes that won't let us just let go? What are we afraid of? What do we think will happen?

The terrorists are not the only bad guys. They are the bad guys, but so are we. We're all just links in the chain: retaliate, retaliate, retaliate; bigger and bigger until someone wins, or everybody dies.

You know, we don't always have to be the winners.

What would happen if Bush deflated his ego, personal and national, for five minutes, and proverbially laid down the sword? What if he withdrew troops from the countries he finds so threatening, and let them work their problems out among themselves? What if, even, he stopped concentrating on mass massacre and starting worrying about the specific people that are actually involved? What if we all realized that the terrorists are not their country, and the country is not the terrorists, but rather, the terrorists are a group of people with minds of their own that should be dealt with individually rather than declaring war on an entire country?

Maybe we wouldn't be able to wag our tongue in everyone's faces and say, "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, we're better than you."

So what?

SO WHAT?

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