Much like Christmas and Arbor Day, the anniverary of the 9-11 attacks is fast becoming yet another opportunity for the useless people you've deleted from your cell phone and tossed out of your Rolodex to interrupt your life with an uplifting, holiday-appropriate e-mail forward.
Case in point: the two e-mails above. I was assailed twice today with a cyber-call-to-action.
The first e-mail (l) is asking me to stick a flag in every orifice of my body and every nook-and-cranny of my home on Sunday, September 11th, in honor of the people who died in the attacks.
I think I'll just observe a private moment of silence on Monday, as that's actually when 9-11 is this year.
The second e-mail I got is a letter from some interior decorator in Georgia who repeats the mantra "I Don't Care" when the issue of human rights violations against muslims comes up in the war on terror. "Slicing throats...forward this...I don't care...Heil Reagan...I don't care...blood...Koran...I don't care..." and so goes the message for another 40 paragraphs.
Sigh.
The "I don't care" e-mail is pretty dead-on, though. That is the same attitude the Bush administration has taken regarding the safety of Americans. In the face of terror, in the face of natural disasters, this administration has stayed the course of sipphoning public money to make its rich friends richer. The biggest supporters of this war are the people cashing in on the hundreds of billions of dollars that it costs to keep the shells flying in Iraq in preparation for Halliburton's eminent domination of the Middle East.
In the meantime, troops don't have the body armor they need, small businesses in New Orleans haven't received support, and across the country 45 million people go without health insurance.
Stick a flag in THAT gaping hole in our country's conscience.
More Americans have died in the war on terror, in the fight against an enemy trained by the Reagan administration during the Cold War, than on 9-11 itself. Add to that death toll the nearly 1,800 people who died in Katrina last year and you've got yet another tragedy to turn into an e-mail free for all. Still proud to be an American?
What bothers me most about these tired forwards is that the very people who feign concern for our country's well being are the same ones who let this administration rob America of everything it once was: progressive, compassionate, human. The Bush administration has waged an unjust war on the world and to distract us from it they have pit Americans against each other with nonsense debates over gay marriage, stem cell research and illegal immigration.
Wake up, America!!
If we're going to honor 9-11 let's do something serious: Let's take our country back. This year's election could win us back Congress and the Senate -- a victory that could give us back the White House in 2008.
We can keep complaining about the abysmal course our country is on or we can rewrite our history. It starts now.
Forward this and get moving.
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