(9-11 Memorial, Evergreen Park, Bremerton, WA)

        Nine Eleven Twenty Twenty Six: Or, What America Has Become By Dale Barrigar

          “Let them be turned back and disappointed / who devise evil against me!” 

         – David, Psalm 35 

The question can be honestly asked whether the USA has improved itself after the grievous wound it suffered on 9/11/2001.

The answer has to be a very resounding NO in most ways, at least from any objective and rational observer.

We have failed miserably to address the rapid destruction of Planet Earth (and since we are the most powerful nation on Planet Earth, by far, we play a very crucial role in this). Not just climate heating has continued to accelerate at a rapid pace; we’ve also, as humans, failed to slow down the loss of forest habitat in the Amazon (in other words, we are chopping down and burning down the most important forest that keeps the planet cool and provides it with oxygen so we can have McDonald’s now) and America continues deforestation on its own lands; we haven’t done a damn thing to slow down species extinction (loss of biodiversity is a much bigger problem than anyone even knows right now, and there are far fewer wild birds now, for example, than there used to be twenty-five years ago); and we’ve failed to address many other key factors on the Planet caused by our own activities that will impact future humanity in negative ways we can’t even imagine yet.

Income inequality has continued to get very, very much worse in the USA in the twenty-five years since 9/11/2001. We have WAY more homeless people now, percentage-wise, than we did then, or than we have ever had since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Democracy has eroded enormously in that time. Freedom House is a reliable network that tracks the freedom of nations based on various scales. Finland gets a score of 100 and is considered totally free. North Korea gets a score of 3 and is considered NOT FREE at all. The USA receives a score of 75 in 2026. We are considered free, but not as free as we used to be. And every year, we fall a little further down into the “less free” category.

Technology has run totally out of control in the USA, since 2001. If AI ever reaches the point of Super Intelligence (and it could very well do so any year now), there will not likely be robots in the streets slaughtering humanity, but it will take over humanity’s current financial systems, which it, AI, has already been caught doing, or trying to do, several times. This could lead to an immediate collapse in internet and phone services, the power grid, and current industrial society as we know it – literally, overnight. This is a worst-case scenario that is now predicted by many of the people WHO INVENTED AI. Now that they’ve gotten us to this point without thinking about the consequences beforehand, they’ve all become whistleblowers. The people who have now taken over the production of AI are industrial capitalists, NOT the brilliant, unfamous minds who invented it in the first place. The people who invented it in the first place would slow it down now if they could; but the industrial capitalists, who are the celebrities and heroes of our modern world, are focused only on making more money for themselves, having taken over everything like greedy swine.

We are, right now, both the USA, and the world, MUCH, MUCH closer to a possible nuclear war than we’ve ever been. Not since we’ve ever been since the Cuban Missile Crisis – since we’ve ever been, EVER, period.

And the USA’s empire is collapsing in many other ways. Our military is running out of ammunition and we don’t have the factories, nor the willpower, to make more. There are very few decent, meaningful jobs for our citizenry. Over two million people are incarcerated (the largest prison population on Earth.) Our educational system and our academic system have become financialized, and the humanities have already collapsed. So many different cultures are crowded together that nobody understands one another, and the people who were already here and stole the land from someone else are now having the land stolen from them by someone else. Our very limited, two-party political system is so corrupt and beholden to nothing but money that it finds itself in complete paralysis. Our president is an oversized, orange, cartoonish “reality show” TV star with yellow hair who doesn’t understand any of the problems facing us, or worse, doesn’t care. Our rigidly conventional president before this one was suffering from dementia, bad.

We have become a land with more guns in it than people. Random shootings of strangers, including children in schools, as well as regular shootings of people who know each other by people who know each other, have grown totally out of control.

Rage and alienation and utter apathy and anomie and utter faithlessness and various kinds of mass delusion/s are everywhere. A spiritual civil war has already begun. 

We ignore the Ten Commandments, and worship the Golden Calf like no civilization ever before in history.

In short, our empire, and our nation, is collapsing right before our eyes.

The list above includes JUST A VERY FEW of the ways it is doing so.

And yet, I still hold out hope for the good old USA!

My reason is the ancient one, the only one, the ONE and only one.

And my reason is the youth of America.

I have seen them rebelling behind the scenes.

I have seen them, quietly, behind the scenes, rejecting what we have become and, quietly, reaching for something new that we can become in the future that is best and is built upon all the best things we have been in the past AND all the better things we can be in the future. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they know they are doing it, and they’re not going to stop any time soon. 

And when I say “youth,” I mean ANYONE who is YOUNG AT HEART!

Even if the world, as we know it, collapses tomorrow around us in one or more ways, the youth of America, and the world, will still be here.  

I recently heard an intelligent commentator on You Tube say, “America can do anything it wants to, if and when IT WANTS TO.”

He meant that we are NOT doing it now, at all, but that, when the time comes, we will do it.

The empire of the UK collapsed a long time ago; and they still remain the fifth wealthiest nation on the Planet, and a major player in planetary affairs. The order is: USA, China, Germany, Japan, UK. At this point, the USA is still much wealthier than China: 33 trillion to 21 trillion.

The USA is in a state of crisis, but we are not going anywhere. 

A volcano, a massive asteroid, a nuclear war, could instantly cool the planet down so much that it enters a new ice age FASTER than overnight.

Any of those things would, ultimately, be an act of God.

And I think that, really, everything is an act of God. We just don’t know it yet (often for very good reasons).

CRITICAL END NOTE: We need to start realizing that the Russians and the Chinese see the world differently than we do (but are still humans). Vlad and Xi do not want to nuke the world any more than we do, and possibly less. The Russians and the Chinese are just as afraid of us, AND PROBABLY MORE SO (for good reason), than we are of them.

I am NOT saying I want to live in China or Russia (I do not, and please don’t deport me, for I was born in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, in 1967), nor that I think their systems are better than ours, or beneficial for humanity in general, either. 

But I am saying that the USA has similar forms of artistic censorship, oppression and repression that are just as bad as theirs are, if not worse!

Dale Barrigar

And From Leila Allison

Of all the dreadful events of 9-11, three have stuck with me most. First is the utter uselessness of the “project”. All the time, money, planning, brainpower put into it surely could have been aimed at helping the poor. Destruction and fear are cheap tricks that do not create respect. No one on the planet is as inaccurate as a terrorist when it comes to understanding the human heart. I cannot begin to imagine what they think would happen. Whatever “victory” they earned was already gone by the following weekend. And although such things never last in our selfish plutocracy Americans actually came together–although that too was showing stress fractures by the following weekend. Think Bill Maher and Ari Fleischer, their remarks shortly after. Now I like Bill, but I recall him going Turtle when the subject of socialism and income was raised on his show. Everyone including Bill were at least 2 percenters. A Telling moment.

Anyway….

The second is the Conspiracy Theories. Similar to the forced slumming the word “icon” continues to endure, the word “theory”, one that I once associated with Great Minds such as Einstein has turned into an Erich von Daniken (he of the Ancient Astronauts) cheap show–just another page in the Globe. You would really have to hate someone to believe that they would orchestrate the murder of three thousand people for the sake of a political agenda. A very dear friend of mine, someone I’ve known for forty years, usually a sane, witty and creative person, is all in for “W” and Uncle Dick and sleeper CIA cells. I do not argue the point. One skill I have, and it has saved me on more than one occasion, is the ability to change the direction of the conversation. The key there is to let the person say enough but then toss in something you both like, such as the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl. Timing is everything.

The third is impossible to reason away. I think about the people at the windows. The ones who went out were travelling somewhere between a hundred twenty to two-hundred MPH at the end. There are no words for it. Nor should there be a place in the thinking world for forcing that “decision” on a person–someone whose biggest choice that day until then involved latte or mocha? There are so many of us, and yet each one of us is a miracle so startlingly profound and capable of grandeur beyond the comparatively short reach of poetry. Who holds it in his heart to make such a thing reality–to choose cruel and violent ends for miracles?

Personally, if heaven can be won by both carefully doing nothing wrong and via such suffering, then there must be levels of heaven as Dante had for hell. And when there are levels there comes slaves and masters. Anyway, to the persons who do such things and will again, creeps like Bin Laden, Hitler, Pol Pot and McVeigh, a hearty “fuck you” for causing me to think that there should be a hell of pain if only for you.

It does not matter who said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”–I’m just hoping that it is true and that we are not the result of random chemical and electrical interactions. I do not want hope to be a fairy story one needs to outgrow on her/his way toward enlightenment.

This is Puck, a Squirrel who lives near the monument. I see him/her every time, and besides collecting sunflower seeds, Puck remembers all things worth remembering.

Leila