Somewhere in Washington later on this afternoon, there will be a gathering of people, assembled at the behest of Right-Wingnut Glenn Beck. A march on DC for the “9/12 Project”, a group that claims to want to reestablish that feeling of oneness and patriotism we all felt the day after 9/11. To see Beck describe it on his television program, you would think that the idea came forth from the heavens in the form of a celestial vision, or perhaps he saw a burning bush by his apartment building. We are going to see a bunch of loyal, patriotic Americans who want to take their country back from the evil oppression of President Obama and the Democratic Party who they’ve demonized into Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists…or is that Joe Stalin and the Communists? Oh well, Communist or Socialist…it doesn’t really matter, because they’re not American anyway.
Please…get a life Beck. You’re giving us recovering alcoholics a bad name. You’re supposed to see all the crazy shit when you’re drinking or detoxing, not when you’re sober. Oh…I forgot; you’re a Mormon and think you get your own planet when you die. Silly me. Can I have the number of your cosmic real estate agent, because I’d like a lovely planet not too close to the sun, but one with some nice beaches and attractive women playing bad drunken calypso music? Yes, the man who can’t even spell “Oligarchy” correctly and who just a few short years ago complained about the sad state of the American Health Care system after a brush with death is going to make sure you get that warm fuzzy feeling you had the day after 9/11/01.
Look, I don’t know how you felt, but I was still trying to make some sense of everything. I had just been through and survived a terrorist attack. I had spent a good portion of the night in the hospital talking to psychiatrists and getting pushed, pinned, stuck, and prodded by a team of physicians who thought I could have been carrying some sort of secret plague after I was exposed to the dust cloud. I got a few fitful hours of sleep, but I was awakened by a nightmare at 2pm…and I couldn’t get to sleep again for another 24 hours. So let me tell you how I felt the day after 9/11, sir…let me tell you about how “warm and fuzzy” I felt…
I was shaking constantly. I was breaking down crying for no reason and at the strangest times. I was seeing flashbacks of people jumping off buildings because they would rather have died that way than be burned to a crisp. I was jumping out of my skin when I heard an engine backfire or if something dropped in the kitchen. And worst of all, I was drinking like a madman trying to get it all to stop…and to forget about the day before. Trust me, I was not waving a flag and being a patriotic robot. I was a damned disaster; a shell of a human being, a frightened man who had just lost everything he had mentally in a few short hours. It was the start of a disability that I still have and prevents me from working to this day…and it was the start of a decent into madness and alcoholism that was to last for another 5 years.
And you want me to go back to the person I was on that day? Are you INSANE? I very much want to go back to the person I was on 9/10…a man with a successful career and a family man who just had his second child. A man who was finally growing up and coming to terms with his life. A man who would go to work day in and day out to support his family with no questions asked. A man who went to work one day and never came home again quite the same way.
Sure, Glenn Beck…perhaps in another parallel universe I felt the way you felt; but not in this one. Please, Beck…do me a favor. Go back to slugging a few because at least I’ll know where this insanity is coming from.
“Never allow someone to be your priority, while allowing yourself to be their option” – Anonymous
Intersections In Real Time 