A Dark Anniversary

It’s been twenty years since The United States lost it’s innocence. Twenty fucking years. And now look at where we are. And here is what I remember from that tragic day:

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September 11, 2001, I was working in the information technology department at Agway as a systems operator. Dan had been at the emergency room at University Hospital (now Upstate Medical University) as a health care technician for over a year now. I was working that day when the news came out that a plane had struck on of the towers at the WTC. My boss had a portable TV in his office and I saw what had happened. We had an emergency operations center with larger TV’s, so I went up there. That is when I saw the towers fall. Everyone who was there was in shock. I immediately went back down to the computer center, and tried to access the news sites on the Internet. No such luck, the net was severely congested with all the people trying to find out information. I immediately called Dan from work and asked him if he knew. The hospital was on lockdown during the crisis, and he couldn’t talk very long. 9/11/01 was one of the most frightening things that had happened in my life. Knowing that terrorists struck a major blow to our country was once of the most disconcerting things that I have ever experienced.

Almost a year later, I was down in New York City for NYC Pride, and I couldn’t even go to the WTC site. I don’t think that I could have handled it.

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It’s now September 11, 2021. A lot has happened since then. I was laid off from Agway six months later, spent a year and a half as a front-end meat robot (point of sale cashier in a supermarket) and four years after Agway, got a job in a corrugated box (what you would call a cardboard box) factory, where I remain after 16 years. I bought my own house, got married to Dan (my now husband) in 2012, and am living pretty much a comfortable life. I suffered a mild heart attack in 2020, and yes I am still alive and kicking.

And we’re (and I am using the collective “we” in this sense) trying to get through the COVID-19 pandemic, no thanks to the anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers that cry about their “civil liberties” being violated. (When will these ASSHOLES ever grow the fuck up?) Yes, I am pro-mask/pro-vaxx. I trust the science, not what some fucking quack/conspiracy theorist says on the Internet.

And we have survived hands down, the worst *period* fucking *period* presidency ever. (Thanks to “The Newsroom” for that.)

Twenty years. A lot of changes. The Internet is ubiquitous, everyone is pretty much reachable because of the proliferation of smartphones, you know what people are doing instantly thanks to social media. Streaming media means that we don’t have to go out to the movies or rental stores for visual entertainment. Music? There are streaming services for that also. Breaking news? We can get it pushed to our phones and computers right when it happens.

Twenty years. In that time, the worst that humanity has to offer has come to the forefront. In 2008, America elected the first African-American to the highest office in the country, the Presidency. And the Republican right did everything in their power to undermine his administration. Constant attacks against his policies, and their efforts to prevent real change in American politics have done more to divide the country. The emergence of the “entitled class” of what passes as human beings has fostered an “us against them” mentality that affects all on a subconscious level. (The “Karen” phenomenon is a prime example of that.) And of course, the aforementioned COVID-19 pandemic, which from what I have seen, is getting worse with the Delta variant and the emergence of the Mu variant. And don’t forget the anti-masker/anti-vaxxer crowd (as I will keep reminding you.) And in 2016, for some inexplicable reason, a misogynistic, sociopathic malignant narcissist was elected to succeed a president who despite all the attacks against him, was able to usher in an era of prosperity and social change over the eight years that he was in office. This again, was the knee-jerk reaction of an entrenched older white-male right-wing political force that saw their control slipping away. So these pathetic cocksuckers choked down their bile, and threw their support behind a candidate that “shared their values” and promised to “make America great again.” They turned a blind eye to his numerous flaws and made the Faustian “deal with the devil.” What they got is a raging beast that they were unable to control and started to lay waste to the country that they were losing control of. That, combined with the apathy of eligible voting age Americans, ushered in four years of a really bad comedy of errors and missteps that has pushed America to the brink of civil war.

On November 5, 2020 collective America actually was roused from it’s apathy and shifted the political landscape from the sociopathic right to the more sympathetic left by voting out the malignant narcissist that tried his best to destroy America. The right-wing so-called “body politic” tried to say that the election was rife with fraudulent votes and “their guy” had really won the election. Since then, there were numerous attempts at tossing out the votes in contested states that had shifted blue in this election, but all the attempts were pretty much stymied by the court system on the federal level. But the real storm was to come.

January 6, 2021. This was the day that America came close to another civil war. On this day, Congress convened to certify the election results (more or less a formality.) Supporters of the malignant narcissist (basically egged on by him at a rally) stormed the Capital to disrupt the counting of the votes of the electoral college. They broke into the Capital building, causing extensive damage, five fatalities, and extensive injuries to rioters and law enforcement alike. Did it stop the certification of the results? Fuck no. The Vice-President finished up the next day, and executive branch of the government shifted from red to blue.

Now we’re at the 20^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The government is more or less left-leaning, and we have a President who inherited the mess that his predecessor created. He’s getting slammed for his mandates on the COVID-19 crisis, and his Vice-President (who is female and not white) isn’t taking any shit from the entrenched white-right-wing that is still in the Senate. The former resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is down in Florida at his shit-hole resort licking his wounds that will probably never heal.

So what is the point of this blog post? Despite the fact that America took a major body blow on September 11, 2001, we survived. It’s been a rough 20 years, but we survived. And we will continue to survive. Basically, it’s a distillation of the human species adapting to changes, and rejecting things that will hasten the decline of the species.

Whew. I can be a long winded old bastard sometimes. But that is me. When I have something to get off my chest, I go all out. Thank you for putting up with the rantings of a misanthropic old fart.

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© 2021, Dean A. Basler Jr.

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