Mediaboss Marketing

I cringe a bit about the 9/11 festivities. Not because it honors the first responders and ordinary people who selflessly risked or sacrificed their lives to help people after and during the attacks no greater love hath any man or woman than to put their life at risk for strangers.

But my unease persisted all day Saturday. I read and heard with dismay the word celebration attached to the activities that commemorate a failure of our intelligence community and our own understanding of the world.

9/11 evoked heroic efforts that led to bad foreign policy and worse politics that cost many more lives here and abroad than the attacks themselves. The attacks provided the justification for the invasion of Iraq that left 4,000-plus American soldiers dead and 130,000 Iraqi civilians to be buried.

And then there was Afghanistan, ready to soak up trillions of dollars, more American lives and send even more uncounted Afghans to the grave, leaving irony as a survivor: we lost more trying to avenge the wrong than the 9/11 attack took, and the whole endeavor resulted in American humiliation a few weeks ago. Further irony can be mined from the loss of 13 lives in a withdrawal process that brought out more than 100,000 with more to come an outcome that could have been as morally catastrophic as our cowardly abandonment of the Kurds in Syria.

But the biggest cost may be the American political process. After 9/11, the nation rallied around President George W. Bush, with Democrats and Republicans vowing to set aside partisan politics to protect Americans going forward. He is my president, said Al Gore, the loser of an election decided without the bother of a recount in Florida. Imagine the Big Lie President admitting, even now, that Joe Biden is anybodys president.

Its hard to imagine anything close to that unity today. We cant even unite behind vaccines and face masks without partisan bickering, bizarre conspiracy theories about microchips and the efficacy of horse dewormer (Ivermectin) as a cure. COVID-19 is a deadly virus-caused disease, not a parasite, and the purveyors of the cure are closer to the latter than the former in their usefulness.

I am sufficiently old to have been among the first children lined up for polio shots and, in a later round, sugar cubes. Nobody suggested then that freedom required thousands of us to be encased in iron lungs for the rest of our lives as a sacrifice to the gods of libertarian principle. Nobody cried hoax, and no would-be presidents intervened to prevent us from being vaccinated.

At a young age, we dreaded the needle but the parental units were unrelenting in their support of the philosophy of no pain, no gain. We didnt wait for years more of testing and absolute surety before saving lives. Jonas Salk invented the vaccine and donated the patent on the grounds that no child should be deprived of life and safety in the interest of profit. Polio lives on only in a few places.

During the Revolutionary War against Britain, George Washington required each and every soldier to be scratched on the arm and have live pustular matter inserted in hopes that a mild case of smallpox would result, a risky process called variolation. The fatality rate for this process was 5-10%, not the one in millions resulting from COVID vaccine injections. Civilians and soldiers were strictly quarantined no exceptions, no whining about personal freedom, no waiting for a few years of testing, no conspiracy theories. The inoculated spent a month in medical care before returning to duty. The process was kept secret from the British, who had some immunity from European exposure and could have attacked while many of the soldiers were recovering from the month after inoculation.

In todays neo-libertarian world, its common practice for speculators to buy patents for life-saving drugs like insulin and jack up the prices the next day. Other patriotic capitalists push fake remedies like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. And it was not long ago that the lovely and inspirational Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. CEO Heather Bresch raised the price of an EpiPen used to prevent anaphylactic shock over several years to 10 times the price paid in Europe, resulting in her own pay increasing from about $2 million to $18 million.

If the 9/11 attacks had resulted in an ongoing willingness to sacrifice even a tiny bit of our teenage impulse of me first if it were all Americans first instead of America First we would have something to celebrate. As it is, there is little to celebrate beyond the memories of the few who responded and still respond with love over selfishness, celebrated but not emulated in even the tiniest way.

Mick Ireland is double vaxxed and double tested but will go back to masking in the interest of a community he loves. Mick@sopris.net.

Read more:
Ireland: Theres something creepy about celebrating 9/11 - Aspen Daily News