I miss being angry. I used to be so full of vitriol and rage that I was certain that I could change things with unbridled passion. I sustained it for years, bolstered by the outrage of fellow humans that shared my sense of unease with the human condition. Something happened that sparked my anger, and it happens- daily and incessantly, and its been happening so long that it’s become normal and my anger has become jaded to the point where it flares into passion much less often. Keeping an eye out for 1984 in a Brave New World as a new story unfurls that makes the classic cautionary tales look like children’s stories.

When the towers fell in New York, our nation lost its mind in the trauma. They fell so fast that we didn’t see 7 collapse for no apparent reason. Or we ignored it. To see the collapse of building 7, for no apparent reason would necessitate some questions about the nature of the whole event. Those questions were too much to ask for a nation in shock. To question what happened, how it happened, why it happened would only lead to more questions, and those questions would lead us back to ourselves.

It was easier to look at the spectacle, over and over and over. It was easier to listen to wailing of the mourners, to stare at the bodies falling in slo-mo, than to ask our selves what really happened, and then demand the answers. We didn’t want to seem insensitive to the tragedy, and so we did not pursue the cause. And the cause was emboldened.

September 11th was not what made me angry. I was angry long before. I was angry at the audacity of a society to ignore its hypocrisy. Our Democracy has been a cover story for our self-indulgence for more than half a century. Our ability to do what we please to get what we want has led us to believe that we’re free. But we’re not. We’ve become more American than human. Entertained, but not sustained. Out notions of ourselves have been corralled into petty selfishness packaged as success. We failed. We failed to fulfill our needs before our wants.

We are broken as a people. The nightly news as our confidence man, sandwiched between cleavage and guns. We know we’ve been taken for a ride, so to make ourselves feel better we decide to do good. We strive to heal the planet and pick up our mess, and yet that was the confidence mans suggestion as well. We’re in hell, and we’ve condemned ourselves to it, because heaven always comes later.

There was a moment in this world when the con mans game wore thin enough for people to be able to see the enemy. The headlines told of the WTO, and the GMO’s and CFR, and the electric car…

And then there was an emergency that we all had to see. A new and improved enemy. Much more sexy and exotic than that boring old rhetoric about human sovereignty, and dignity. And humanity.

A dictator has come unwittingly, and it is we. We let this happen through inaction. We enslaved ourselves with our greed for “Freedom™”, and our neglect to understand what it means to truly be free.
We don’t want to tolerate “outrageous conspiracy theories.” We don’t want to question the integrity of our culture. We don’t want to know what happened that makes us all feel so powerless and small. But we need to.