September Song

Three ways to mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11:

1. The New York Times today published some text Spalding Gray wrote in the aftermath of 9/11 for the monologue he was working on at the time of his death in 2004.

For 34 years I lived with you and came to love you. I came to you because I loved theater and found theater everywhere I looked. I fled New England and came to Manhattan, that island off the coast of America, where human nature was king and everyone exuded character and had big attitude. You gave me a sense of humor because you are so absurd.

When we were kids, my mom hung a poster over our bed. It had a picture of a bumblebee, and under the picture the caption read:

"According to all aerodynamic laws, the bumblebee cannot fly because its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wingspan. But ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway."

That is still New York City for me.

2. This morning I received an email from Michael Moore containing a letter he wrote this weekend to people who voted for George W. Bush. You can read the full letter on his website, but here are a couple of excerpts:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

[...]

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

3. The podcasting series about 9/11 from a Maltese perspective continues today with my original webcast from 2001 about the online Bed-In for Peace organized by Amy Berg and Andy Cox in October, just after the so-called war on terror started in Afghanistan. That Bed-In helped us come to terms with the overwhelming sense of hopelessness we felt at the time. I believe that if we really want to change the world the best way to start is by changing ourselves. Easier said than done, of course, but the alternatives are much worse.

Last year, on the third anniversary of 9/11 I added the body count meter from the so-called war on terror in Iraq to my blog. The number of Iraqi civilian casualties has thankfully stopped rising at the alarming rate it was back then, but the over-all body count continues to swell obscenely, as does the cost of the senseless war.