7 years later and we're still in the same place.

I just found an open letter I wrote 5 years ago. It was describing some of my feelings on 9/11. Its weird because looking at these words, now I sort of feel like they're still relevant. Our Country hasn't changed much since that day. We're still arrogant as ever, we're still spending billions of dollars in a country that didn't want our help. We're still not taking care of the folks that are born here. Oh well, enough about my rhetoric right now i'll send post it up and allow ya'll to read it.



September 9, 2003 (Washington, DC)



**ATTENTION You may not agree with all that I have to say, but as my friend I know you will not judge me or have this change your view of me**



Friends I write to you today from a place that some of you have very rarely seen, but have heard me speak of. I’m writing from that place I retreat to when I’m all alone and sitting in my room with one light and a pen in my hand. I’m sitting here at work, and I can’t shake this very somber feeling that has taken over my day so far. It is all connected to the events that took place on this day two years before. I can remember sitting in my room by myself watching the television for hours before I even realized what had really happened. I remember the anxiousness that I felt, the feeling of not knowing how or why something like this could have happened.



Then I started to contemplate and I knew, I knew that our own arrogance had played the largest part in an event this terrible. I then started to think of what the aftermath of something of this magnitude would be like. Would there be blatant discriminatory acts perpetrated against Arab Americans, would the term Towelheads, but thrown around in as hatefully a manner as nigger, chinc, or spic has been in the past? Would we as a society take a closer look at ourselves and realize that we have been welcomed to the world that we so called lead? What could/should be done to retaliate against those that wish to do us harm? Should we bomb an entire region of the map because we lost lives? People in countries around the world loose lives on the scale of their own 9/11 almost weekly, so what justifies our actions? These are some of the things that plagued my mind then and even now as I sit here today.



We are two years removed but what has really been accomplished? We have spent billions of dollars on a war? We have lost more American lives; we have killed so many innocent Iraqi and Afghan peoples. We have shown the might that is the United States of America, and for what? For what I ask you, what has been accomplished? I for one do not feel any better now then I did any other day that I lay my head down to sleep. I do not feel that all the money we are taking away from Educational programs, Health care, and Social Security is going to a worthy cause. I don’t know what I feel really, although my words may seem full conviction I am torn between all of my global justice feelings, and those patriotic feelings that we all know we have at some level.



I will not lie to you, there were a few days after 9/11 that I felt like people didn’t look at me as that young black male, but rather as an American. All of you know me well enough to know this is a gigantic statement. For that although fleeting and very short lived I do love this country, for all of its faults, all of its atrocities, for all of it shortcomings, it’s my country. Now my thoughts turn to remembering those whose lives were lost. Hopefully we will not forget them, and turn them into a sale day where we can get shoes half off. Or where we can party until the sun comes up the next day because of these Fathers, Mothers, Sons, Daughters, Grandparents, so on and so forth that are no longer with us. To those firemen, and police officers and all around good people who went to help others just for the sake of. I will remember them, and I hope that at some point situations like this one in which they lost their lives, will never come to pass again. T



hese are just some of the things that have been inside of my head this morning. Dae



So yea that was 5 years ago, how do we feel about it now?