Before you read any further, be warned, I am in a foul mood and I am about to let my stream of consciousness flow, with no clear idea where that flow is going to go.
How can it already be 14 years since 9/11 became yet one more date which will likely live on in infamy?
I do not know why it annoyed me, well, except, maybe, due to the craven obviousness, but this morning, on Facebook, I found the multiple exhortations from various Friends to "Never Forget", "To Always Remember", with multiple variations of such, most with the twin towers burning and an eagle part of the image, to be annoying.
Do we really need to be advised to never forget and to always remember something which is etched forever in the memory of us who were alive that shocking morning?
I will never forget getting a call from Dallas, telling me the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. I knew the caller was calling from near the Dallas World Trade Center. So, I assumed it was the Dallas World Trade Center we were talking about.
I turned on the TV just as the second plane hit the second tower, not in Dallas, but in New York City. I sat staring at the tube, shocked. When I realized both towers had been hit I realized this was no accident, that America was under attack.
I then began waking up people on the west coast, telling them they needed to get up and turn on their TVs.
Oddly, all these years later, many of those I called that morning no longer live on the west coast. The number of people I would call on the west coast, now, in a similar circumstance, has dwindled to a couple nephews and a few others.
I digress.
I thought maybe going jogging and the resulting endorphins might shake me out of my foul mood. So, I drove a couple miles west to park on the Quanah Parker Park parking lot.
Before I started running I walked under the shade of one of the world's biggest pecan trees and took the picture you see above. Big trees ooze negative ions which make one feel good, like how the negative ion spewing ocean makes one feel.
The Quanah Parker Park big pecan tree did not have that salubrious negative ion effect on me today. Maybe it takes a forest.
So, I continued on with the jogging.
As I ran along my thoughts drifted to being annoyed at what has happened after 9/11, after George W. Bush informed those who knocked down the towers that they would be hearing from all of us soon.
What the world ended up hearing from us ain't pretty.
After 9/11 America invaded Iraq for reasons which should be investigated, in a much more needed and much more valid investigation than the absurd Republican fixation on Benghazi, with the perps who instigated the crime, tried, convicted and jailed. Iraq is a country which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, the invasion eventually left not only Iraq destabilized, but the entire Middle East in worse shape than it was pre-9/11.
The country we pseudo-liberated is now largely taken over by a terrorist group from hell. A group which has beheaded who knows how many innocents. Which executes young boys for watching soccer. Which rapes women, turning them into slaves. Throws suspected gays off roofs and commits atrocity after atrocity which has mortified and horrified the world.
Yet little has been done.
We invaded a sovereign nation, toppled its ruler, had him executed, eventually left that nation in an unstable condition, hence the rise of ISIS.
And now with ISIS, a scary threat far worse than Saddam Hussein ever dreamed of being, who presented no real threat to the U.S. or the world, in this century, due to being de-fanged after the first Iraq War, the supposedly civilized part of the world is basically doing nothing, in a meaningful way, to put ISIS out of the world's misery.
Where are the UN Security Council meetings on ISIS?
So much was lost in so many ways in the taking down of Saddam Hussein, who presented no real threat. And then something comes along, ISIS, that is not a potential threat, but is an actual real present threat.
And nothing is done, for the most part, except for drone strikes and some attempts by the Iraqis and Kurds to push ISIS out of their territory.
It's like how the world dithered while Hitler's madness fed on itself as he took over one area after another until he went too far by invading Poland.
I really don't know how anyone can think back on that day 14 years ago and not be appalled by what has been wrought in the aftermath. Not exactly the happy ending the world and America had in 1945, when only a little more than three years after America entered World War II the fascist menace to the world was exterminated.
Somehow it seems that putting an end to the terrorist/ISIS menace should be a much easier task than taking down the Nazis and the Japanese.
Instead the world dithers......
