Unsafe From Any Angle

Monday marks five years since those treacherous bastards exceeded their own hopes and everyone else’s fears by bringing down the Twin Towers. These milestones—one year, five years, 10 years—are arbitrary, but unavoidable. The media make sure of that. One year since Katrina, five years since 9/11, and what difference does any of it make? One year on or five years, the stark realization is the same: nothing has changed.

Well, it isn’t that nothing has changed. The Indignant Citizen can’t take a bottle of water or an electric razor, or toothpaste on an airplane. In order to get into an ordinary office building these days you have to empty your pockets and pass through a metal detector that still beeps if you’re wearing a nice belt. And 2,658 U.S. soldiers have died fighting an endless war against a vague enemy in the sands of a country that isn’t a country anymore and that had nothing to do with either 9/11 or Katrina. And don’t we feel safer for all that?

Shit, the Indignant Citizen thought he could never feel more unsafe than standing on the Brooklyn Promenade, with the smoke and flames from United 175’s plunge into the South Tower of the World Trade Center billowing overhead and the echo of the twin concussions still echoing in the Wall Street canyons across the river. The Indignant Citizen was wrong. Because actually now things feel very unsafe. Despite all the security precautions we’ve taken, despite all the Jersey barriers we’ve plunked down around Important Sites, despite all the times we’re required to show identification, despite all of it, isn’t it just a matter of time before some other wing-nut blows up something else here, killing even more people?

Really, what’s to prevent an explosives-laden truck from pulling up outside the Indignant Citizen’s office building in the Loop? Or plowing into a department store, or a mall? The Indignant Citizen could show three forms of identification and be subjected to a strip search and a rectal exam just to order a Big Bacon Classic at the Wendy’s and none of it would keep some band of unhinged Jihadistas from taking out a couple hundred elementary school kids in Wheeling with a few automatic weapons and some grenades from the surplus store.

Meanwhile our goofy president goes on TV and tries to convince us that we’re safer because we had some bad guys locked up in secret and probably illegal prisons in foreign countries, where we most likely tortured them to get them to tell us what they know. We have no way of knowing for sure whether any of it worked or not, we can only take the goofy president’s word for it, since none of the proceedings are public, nor any of the information.

The Indignant Citizen will be in New York on Sept. 11 this year. This was not planned, things just worked out that way. Barring some other catastrophe between now and then, he expects to find a city functioning very much as it did on Sept. 10, 2001, and very much the way the rest of the country functions today. As traumatic as Sept. 11 was five years ago—and make no mistake, it was a gut-wrenching event at the time—it turned out to be a blip on the radar screen for most people.

Whatever feelings of community and patriotism we felt broadly in the days and weeks after 9/11 have faded amid the constant drumbeat of war and the increasingly vapid and ridiculous culture we are building for ourselves, a culture in which the death of an entertainment figure who wrestles crocodiles can knock off the front page stories about how the Taliban are enjoying a resurgence in Afghanistan. Oh, remember the Taliban? Remember Afghanistan? The War on Terror and all that? It’s so easy to forget, what with all the stories about new oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico that could supply U.S. demand for all of one to three years.

In case you’re interested, there’s a little story in USA Today about how unprepared the U.S. is for its next catastrophe. Well, unprepared in a response sense. We’re certainly prepared in a viewership sense. Hundreds of TV stations are ready to send reporters and cameras toward the danger at a moment’s notice, to feed our visual stimulation addiction.

Then, once again, we can look at the pictures and say how terrible it all is, how everything has changed now. And this time we’ll mean it. Really.