Osama bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 people on that awful day exactly seven years ago, but damage and death was all he could accomplish. He could never destroy or even weaken the fundamental values and freedoms that make us Americans, because the liberties and freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution are forever beyond the reach of terrorists. Only we Americans through poor choices of leadership can damage and destroy American freedoms and liberties by allowing them to be eroded by things like the oxymoronic Patriot Act, internal spying, subversion and loss of our governmental balance of powers, covert agendas, and official lies. The outgoing (we hope) Bush administration has taken us farther down that road of destroying America than bin Laden could have ever dreamed of, and I for one do not consider that an appropriate response to terrorism.
As a nation we ought to have been able by now to view terrorism in a larger perspective. For example, we calmly accept death rates each and every year from tobacco that are at least a hundred times greater (300,000+ fatalities) than the worst Osama bin Laden has done one time. We tolerate with barely a whimper the callous corporate greed of our own tobacco companies that routinely kill far more Americans than bin Laden ever has, without the slightest suggestion that we should give up our proud freedoms and liberties to solve at far greater problem. This is not to precisely equate death by terrorism with death by tobacco because tobacco involves some choice, at least in the beginning of the addiction. The point is our priorities are completely backward and wrong by focusing on and fearing a relatively tiny risk of death to the drastic and tragic extent of abandoning our own Constitutional principles while at the same time we remain almost completely complacent about risks of death that are orders of magnitude greater. It's not only tobacco, we blithely put ourselves at far greater risk of death than terrorism offers every time we drive our cars. We have completely failed to see the forest for the trees.
George Bush Junior was probably right when he once said that terrorism would never be eliminated, although he quickly flip-flopped on that accidentally truthful statement for obvious political reasons and reversed himself to say instead that America would win the war on terrorism. Europe has dealt rationally with terrorism for years without sacrificing their fundamental liberties and freedoms, and so could America if we chose to. But shifting our country in the direction of a police state is not a rational response, it is a fearful response, a reaction to fear that appears to have been carefully stage-managed for political purposes to allow for the concentration of power in the hands of the Executive branch, specifically the neocons. Trust us and America will be safer, they say! I say their fear mongering to win acquiescence for their police state desires will destroy the very heart and soul of our great land if we allow them to continue as they have for very much longer.
It has not seemed to penetrate the American consciousness yet that the root cause of Islamic terrorism, religious fanaticism, is nearly as bad in our own country. We have mirror-image counterpart extremists who seriously believe God is on our side and that He supports the killing of Muslims in foreign lands. We have a nut case of a President who proclaims his belief that God chose him for the job, and a candidate hoping to replace him who openly panders to millions of nut cases who somehow think in much the same way.
America is plagued by millions of religious extremists would like to gain ever more control of our government so as to impose by force of law their twisted views on everyone they can, and all too many of them with such extreme motivations already hold significant positions of power in Washington.
One would think that after such a demonstration of evil on 9/11/01 in the name of religion that Americans would properly react as our Founders intended by expunging every last vestige of the creeping extremist religious influences that have wormed their way into our own government. But that has not happened, and the War on Terrorism has morphed into a kind of Holy War for evangelicals. They are deadly serious in their belief that it is a war of Christianity against Islam, and they are eager to fight it; this is no exaggeration, I have talked face-to-face to some of them that put it exactly in those terms.
We ought to have learned from the events of 9/11 that this great country's founders had the correct vision for America, and we should react appropriately to terrorism by reaffirming our root values and making them even stronger instead of responding inappropriately to fear and consequently eroding American values and freedoms.
Instead we as a country have sunk to the low moral level of terrorists ourselves by invading Iraq under false pretenses and by allowing fear and religion to justify hatefully criminal actions like torture. By allowing the erosion of our fundamental American freedoms we as a nation have corrupted ourselves and become our own worst enemy. Osama bin Laden is a trivial threat to America in comparison to the wrong direction our country's leaders have been taking us for far too long. We should be engaging in a national dialogue about how to make ourselves better and stronger as a country with the values and principles that are our birthright, and never allow those values and principles to be compromised through fear tactics. But it's been seven years now, and irrational fear still dominates our political scene. America deserves better. We are either going to change, or we will remain Americans in name only.