Have we ceased to be America?

Mushroom has posted something very powerful at Fungle Jungle:

One of the worst things that has ever been done in this country – and feel free to place the blame wherever you like – is the desecration of how we as a people felt on September 11, 2001. It should have been another Pearl Harbor, something we honored, not for the death and destruction but for the way it brought us together against barbarism. As it is, we are allowed to remember the tragedy, fear, and despair, even the heroism of the police and firefighters who perished, but we are supposed to be ashamed of the righteous indignation we felt in the aftermath. They took the images off of television so we wouldn’t be continually stirred up by the inhumanity and insanity of the perpetrators. They told us that we did not need to sacrifice, that the best thing we could do was go shopping. They trivialized the awful reality of war and turned it into a video game, distancing us from it, except and until they wanted us to feel guilty and ashamed for the deaths of our servicemen and the “innocent civilians” in the places we attacked.

In the process, we ceased to be America. You may say I’m crazy or overstating or oversimplifying or whatever. I know that I felt like an American all my life. I tried to figure out a way to volunteer for military service when I was too old to be accepted after 9/11. I no longer feel that way. I could say it is because of Barack Obama who is certainly despicable, but I also have to blame George Bush who, for all his “Christian compassion” and resolve after the attacks, refused to call us to war – all of us, refused to call us together against an enemy. Instead he talked about the “religion of peace” and warred against a methodology. Instead of sweeping through Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, punishing and destroying and making it clear that attacking us is a really, really bad idea, we have wasted years, billions of dollars and thousands of lives trying to “democratize” a bunch of people who just want their tribe and their chiefs and their sickness and demons and can understand nothing except force.

Read more here: http://funglejungle.blogspot.com/2013/04/commemorate.html