The Day the World Stayed the Same
The Anniversary Essay

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my blog. It has warped and mutated a lot over that year, but so have I. One day after the World Trade Center fell, I received an email telling me that my purchase of thehyaena.net was official. The go-live was delayed by world events, as well as my own rusty HTML skills, but here she is today. Visit my Journals Page if you want to get reminiscent.

So we all seem to have survived the past year. One thing I had a hard time surviving, however, was the television yesterday. With few alternatives, if we were watching telly, we were forced to see the Twin Towers fall again and again and again... Seeing all the dewey-eyed people talking about how the "lives" lost had "touched them". And in the background, like the energizer bunny, they keep falling and falling and falling and falling...

One thing which no one seems to be admitting, but which I have admitted over and over for a year, is that not too many of us really care about the "loss of life". And yet that's the only thing which was commemorated yesterday. Even at six degrees, few of us actually knew - and were personally close to - anyone who died in the attacks. The fact is that those of us - like myself - who took the attacks seriously and personally, did so because we were attached to those huge boxy buildings. Despite their hideous plainness and Radiant City sameness, they were our embodiment of New York, of America, of life as human beings... It's those buildings we weep for, not the nameless, faceless "victims".

Once again, the media has focused upon victimhood as the greatest of all virtues. Meanwhile we as a nation have done very little to avenge, prevent and repress the forces which precipitated this event. We spent months before acting at all, and when we acted, it was half-assed and timid. We were more concerned with placating our "allies" - who were not attacked and who were in no way supportive of our case at all - than with routing out evil. We are a nation of pussies, and we should be absolutely ashamed on this drama-ridden anniversary. We refuse to see our freedom as something worth fighting for, and treat the destruction of our greatest monuments like a tantrum from someone else's child, claiming to be powerless against it whilst at the same time endlessly complaining about it.

I have seen the World Trade Center fall hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the past year, and I still get choked up over it. I honestly care very little for the "victims" - who were they? What did they do? Why was their death so "honerable"? What I miss more than anything is those skyscrapers - their massive enormity reaching to the heavens in butalist defiance, mocking the architectural fashion Nazis. If I need to put a human face on what I miss, I would say it's the men who built those towers: their great minds creating the greatest piece of real estate on Earth; towers which - despite the fact that they eventually fell - stood defiantly for endless moments, even when kerosene-laden transcontinental jets slammed squarely into them.

For a year, I have commented on this nation of pussies - on our unwillingness to fight, to rebuild, to stand up for our ideals. I'm rather well-jaded now. I doubt New York will ever have the cacophanous beauty of those two monstrosities ever again. I doubt Americans will ever return to a time when they proactively defended their freedom and wealth. The men around me today are too scared to defend anything. They would rather give up and give in, trade freedom for security, trade their potential for their immediate satisfaction. Every moment we stood by and watched as our country was being attacked and failed to retaliate against every single anti-American element on this Earth, we wittled away a bit of who we were and what made us different - and better - than everyone else.

What should we have done? Simple: within hours of the attacks, we should have issued an unconditional ultimatum to every single hostile state on this Earth - that we were prepared to blast every city in every dictatorship into the stone age if they did not immediately and unconditionally grant us full inspection privelages of their military, weapons and industrial infrastructure and training systems. And then we should have come through on that promise. Best case scenario: the dictators of the world step down and their states are no longer a threat to their people or to us. Worst case scenario: the states which threaten our lives are ended and the potential for further terrorism obliterated. Terrorists can't harm us when their entire infrastructure and the states which sponsor it are wiped out completely. And yet wiping it out comletely is exactly what we've been refusing to do from the start.

I can't help but plead with Americans to realize that we are, in fact, a better nation than all the others. We are a more honorable people than any other. We are a nation founded upon the right to life. We are not a stodgy old monarchy with democratic credentials like so many European states; we are not a dictatorship or theocracy; we are not founded upon the odious tenants of "thy brother's keeper" like every former- and post-Soviet state around the globe. We are here because once in history great men gathered to evaluate what a state should be - and realized that it should be an entity which protected an individual man's right to live and work as he wished, without coercion or extraction. We are better. That's what gives us the right to uphold our nation above all others. That's what makes it imperitive that we destroy those who would destry us. That's what makes it so sad that we refuse to defend ourselves.

Today, the realities of cannibalism are alive, as Americans prepare to die a slow death after a generation living off the triumphs of their forefathers. It saddens me. Our foreign and security policy resembles our spending habits - consumption and saturation. A nation of cardholders with no future or resolution - with only our false credit and our parent's help to see us through. What will we do when our cards are maxed out - when we've been resigned to servitude to our worst enemies - when our parents (the founders and builders and producers who came before us) are no longer here?