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Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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10:18 a.m. - 2003-06-07
Who truly speaks for the dead? I wonder about this quite often. Conservatives wave around the names and numbers of those who died on Sept 11. They wave their lists around like the hand drawn posters fans make and wave over their heads at ball games. "Look at me! Here I am! See what a good fan I am?" Yet, those fans bring their signs not so much because their life's blood pumps Cub blue and white, but because they want to be on TV. They want the attention. I'm appalled at how cynically the GOP is using the dead. Counting on the knee jerk emotional response to cloud even their most blatant outrages. They wave their list and get people to go along by insinuating that if we don't, we have forgotten the dead and their deaths are meaningless. "We must honor their memories by suspending the Constitution! We must make their deaths meaningful by creating a Secret Police! We must honor the dead by rooting out all our evil doers! Jaywalkers! Protesters! Litterers! People who make illegal rights on red! Those and so many more “traitors” are ENDANGERING our American way of life! The dead would agree that all measures we deem necessary are essential! What are trifles like privacy and the Miranda Act compared to the Sept 11 martyrs? We KNOW they’d be behind us!” Somehow I seriously doubt that. I remember the dead all too well. Those 5 funerals I attended, funerals with empty coffins because the bodies couldn’t be recovered from the wreckage. Funerals with flags and bagpipes and oceans of tears. At Talent Night when Ian opened the show with his pipes, the audience went nuts and I sat there trying my best to hold in my tears. The skirl and lilt of bagpipes will forever take me back to those funerals. Rigidly upright wives clutching the hands of bewildered children who could not understand why Daddy was never coming home. The filthy reporters from the tabloids hoping for hysterics to photograph, hoping for quotes about ghosts and premonitions, filthy disgusting muckrakers trying to score a cover story. The mainstream media wasn’t much better. The guy from “Newsweek” offering his condolences and pressing his card in the widow’s hand with a wish for an interview. Feh. But were their antics any worse than what the Bushmen are doing? Trading on grief to get what they want? I think of Tom H. Third generation FDNY. He and his family scrimping and saving and finally building their dream house in the country. Mike did the heating and plumbing on Tom’s dream house and I spoke with Tom many times. The first of his clan to move out of the city, he averred that while he loved the city and had spent all of his adult life protecting it, NYC was no place to raise children. His daughters would grow up free. No muggers or junkies or perverts or streetwalkers. No canyons of concrete. No bars on the windows of his home or his daughters’ school. His girls would have a big green yard to play in and wide open horizons to see out of unbarred windows. Their school would be clean and fresh and SAFE. Tom wanted to give a life of freedom to his children. I can’t imagine he’d be happy that his children’s liberty has been stolen by men who used HIS name and memory to do it. Is THAT the legacy of Sept 11? That those who died are used as the smoke screen and emotional grease to warp our constitution and make war for profit? To use them as reelection bonus chips? Is that what their lives were worth? ~LA
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