As we pass another 9-11 I ponder what will be our historical memory. The unity that we faced after 9-11 is long since gone.
Of course it is acceptable to disagree with the post 9-11 reaction to a brutal attack on our country. Americans do disagree on policy all the time and intellectual freedom is what separates us from Commies like Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Ill or Renagade Eye.
It is never acceptable to engage in Truther BS. Truthers are the lowest of the low on a par with Holocaust Deniers. Making a mockery of 3000 dead for political purposes is an insult to everyone who was there and those of you who watched at home in horror.
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5 comments:
Beaker-As Americans, we are forgetting...the Project 2996 site only had about 1,080 names taken.
THAT is a tragedy in itself...
G*D bless and MARANATHA!
tmw
Beak, I saw rows of flags this morning and had to pull over or I'd wreck my car. It's been that bad for me today. Last year, not a single problem. Strange.
Our country is falling apart. That was my topic today.
Truthers....we pulled one of them from the podium at our tea party. He was a decorated vet. I told him that I was deeply ashamed and for him to stop telling the crowd he was one of us.
Today's poem:
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by MartÃn Espada
for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local l00, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, Mexico, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
PM Stephen Harper speaking at Canadian 9/11 memorial - short video here
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