Kathe Geist: The ironies and lessons of 9/11

At the risk of sounding irreverent, I have to say I am relieved that our 25^th 9/11 anniversary has finally passed. I am not sure what remembering the sadness, the horror, and uncertainty of that day accomplishes except to divert us from the ongoing crises we are living through. Climate change continues to wreak havoc on lives, homes, and livelihoods and cause drought in many places, all while we have a madman for a president and, thus, essentially, no government.

In this regard, the one thing the 9/11 commemorations declined to mention was the extent to which the George W. Bush administration took its eye off the ball in terms of anticipating and heading off a terrorist attack. The World Trade Center had already been bombed by terrorists, and the Clinton administration had prioritized counter-terrorism under adviser Richard Clarke.

In contrast, the Bush administration downgraded Clarke’s role and ignored his memos. Of course, recriminations 25 years after the fact would register as petty and unproductive were it not for the fact that the Trump administration has wantonly fired thousands of civil servants, leaving us vulnerable on many fronts, including the threat of terrorism. Certainly, a president who never reads his daily briefs, lives in a world of fantasies and lies, alienates allies, and glorifies violence is incapable of keeping us safe. The Bush administration may have dropped the ball, but the current administration has no ball.

I feel particularly annoyed by signs that read “9/11 Never Forget.” If electing an ignorant, incompetent, self-obsessed lunatic twice is not forgetting — that we are vulnerable, that we need a rational, responsible government — I don’t know what is.

While we both mourn the deaths and admire the activism of the passengers on doomed Flight 93, let’s remember that those people died saving the U.S. Capitol, which homegrown terrorists, encouraged by Donald Trump, ransacked 20 years later with the clear intention of harming its occupants. Many commentators have mourned our loss of the unity forged after 9/11 but failed to note the ironies and lessons we ought to understand by remembering it.