Man, That Sucked: 9/11

Sometimes, in commenting on how much everything sucks now, this blog may give the mistaken impression that things were better at some point in the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. In our opinion, everything sucks, has sucked, and will suck for the foreseeable future. Man, That Sucked is a regular feature that explains why the past wasn't any better than the present. Today: September 11.

September 11, 2001 sucked for all kinds of obvious reasons. 3,000 people died immediately in a variety of horrible ways. The collapse of the towers spread dust into the air that caused hundreds or thousands of cases of asthma and other respiratory diseases. Rescue workers are still sick from the cleanup. And thanks to the pair of wars that were started as a more or less direct result of 9/11, the body count from the fall of the World Trade Center is still rising.

But worse than the lives lost is the pointlessness of it all. Even if you look at 9/11 from the point of view of the terrorists, if you think that America is the greatest evil in the world and must be destroyed at any cost, if your ultimate goal is to set the North American continent on fire and establish sharia as universal law--even then, how can you justify flying those planes into those towers? American global hegemony wasn't disrupted, capitalism continues to be a dominant force around the world..from their point of view, what did the suicide bombers accomplish? If they really ended up in Paradise, are they looking down on the world and smiling at their role in a war that their side has no hope of winning?

If you can call the global conflict between Western capitalism and fundamentalist Islam a war, it has to be the most hopeless, endless, pointless war in centuries. Neither side has a hope of winning. America and its allies invade countries, occupy land, kill terrorists and suspected terrorists that are replaced almost immediately by more fanatics equally willing to die. Meanwhile, these fanatics plot to blow up more buildings, set improvised explosive devices at roadsides in Iraq and Afghanistan, and kill a Marine or two when they get lucky. How is either side going to win? Even if America captures Osama Bin Laden and somehow sets up fragile democracies in the countries we're occupying, is there going to be a day when we've killed the last terrorist and no one wants to blow us up? And even if the fanatics somehow blow up the White House, or the Pentagon, is America going to stop killing people in the Middle East? Will the multinational corporations stop selling their sinful, sharia-defying products?

September 11 should be a day of mourning, not just for the people who died on that day, but for the soldiers who continue to get killed in dusty, foreign places, for the Palestinians who die from Israeli rocket fire, innocent Iraqis killed due to confusion or misinformed intelligence, Israelis who died just for riding the bus or going to a nightclub, suicide bombers who had their desperation and earnestness turned into weapons--we should mourn all of these people today, because not only are they dead, I can't see that any of their deaths have made much of a difference. And the war goes on.