Thoughts On 9/11 - Nine Years Doesn't Feel Like Nine Years

The madness of the terrorist attacks on United States soil via jet airliner does not seem to be nine years ago. Rather, a few key points - combined with the fact that every second of my nearly forty-three years alive is less a percentage than the previous one - makes the date thrive in my mind.

1. Osama bin Laden has still not been captured (nor his body discovered in a pile of rubble).

2. Homegrown terrorists have felt empowered enough to take advantage of the very liberty they decry for others by threatening the creators of the "South Park" television show over a supposed visual depiction of their so-called "prophet."

3. A fundamentalist Christian church headed by a criminal whose members barely total fifty can garner national media attention for weeks just by mentioning their desire to burn a Qur'an (aka "Koran" for the less initiated), leading to a preponderance of salivating by those who would love to use such an event as a recruiting tool.

4. George W. Bush has been proved to have been a puppet of members of his administration who may not have been involved in conspiratorial planning but who most certainly knew how to take advantage of the opportunity to grab power when such a thing presented itself.

5. U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East.

6. Pakistan is about as stable as my first ex-wife.

7. Saudi Arabia and Iran's support of terrorist activities in the Middle East, as well as that of the Saddam Hussein regime, has not only been flagrantly identified, but the thuggish ability of the latter country's leaders to violently quash a mostly peaceful uprising of their own youth suggests similar future (or current) activities are far from being simply theoretical.

8. The majority of civilized society still sees nothing wrong with teaching children to believe in a deity which not only has been proven to be a fictional character based upon an amalgamation of all the deities invented by humans prior to the time ancient Canaanites first wrote the five chapters of what led to the existence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but it fails - time and time again - to account for the fact that all three versions of faith (as well as their literally thousands of variant forms/translations) include calls to kill those who do not follow the same "god" as each religion's adherents (horrendously amusingly, there are those who try to decry those who do use the text to inspire or enact violence as "radicals").

9. We still have nothing but an empty space on the former grounds of the Twin Towers.

Nope. Doesn't feel like nine years at all. I feel as if we've been swimming in a vat of congealed shortening, barely able to move forward and unlikely to see precisely what is in front of us.

I hope the next years' total number of strokes result in what at least feels like forward momentum.