Wait a minute.  Put down those pitchforks and torches.  Stop heating that tar barrel and put those feathers away.  Let me explain.  What a preposterous thought, you might say.  Indeed, it does seem outrageous, even treasonous.  But let me explain how I came to this conclusion.  You may or may not agree with me, but I hope you can come to understand where I’m coming from.  Come step into the Wayback Machine (Sherman, Peabody, please make room) and let’s take a little trip.

First stop, 1984.  Nothing to do with Orwell, I’m talking to a Catholic priest in my pre-marriage conversion.  Father Schmidt is talking to me one on one about the Catholic faith.  He talks about how some people misunderstand the use of the icons, statues, and artwork in the churches.  We aren’t praying TO the statues of Mary, he stresses.  We’re using the artwork as visual aids to help us make that connection to the reality that is Mary.  His voice strengthens as he says “The minute that we start to pray to a statue or a picture, the minute that we worship a piece of artwork, that’s when we need to tear down the statue or put that painting away.  The artwork serves to remind us of God, not to replace God.”  That really stuck with me all these years.   More on this later.   Back in the Wayback Machine, forward to September 11, 2001.

 It’s an ordinary Tuesday at work.  One of my technicians hollers over the cubicle walls that a plane hit the World Trade Center.  Holy crap, I thought.  What kind of a doofus pilot was that?  Of course later it developed that the pilots were mass murderers rather than incompetent twits.  As the morning wore down, reports of the Pentagon attack, the 4^th plane down, wild rumors of car bombs at the State Department, the White House and Capitol evacuated.  I felt something I had never felt before… fear.  Real fear.  I was too upset to work.  So I signed out for the afternoon and went home.  I wanted to be with my family.  I kept a nervous eye on the horizon as I drove home, half expecting mushroom clouds to burst in my field of view.  I told myself that this would be the Pearl Harbor of my generation.  A day we would never forget.  A day we must never forget.  Back in the Wayback Machine, forward to the start of the Afghan War.

 I was all for it.  Disgusted that Bush was going to get credit for it, but I was all for the invasion.  Al Qaeda got us, the Taliban was harboring Al Qaeda, let’s go get ‘em.  Still, I was a bit uneasy.  Uneasy in the knowledge that Afghanistan is where empires go to die.  Uneasy knowing that we’re going in to fight the same people that we armed to fight the USSR during the Carter and Reagan years.  Sure enough, the Taliban fled into exile.  But that wasn’t enough for Bush and Cheney.  They wanted to use 9/11 as an excuse to go into their true objective, Iraq.  And as we set the Wayback Machine to trolling speed, we see Bush carefully conflating 9/11 and Iraq without ever actually saying explicitly that the two were related.  Soon enough, polls showed that most Americans thought that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.  Bush had the political capital to push for the war that he had wanted even before setting foot in the Oval Office.  He successfully used the victims of 9/11 as political pawns to start this war.  The exploitation of the victims of 9/11 had begun.

 Still at trolling speed on our time machine, we see over a million Iraqis dead as a direct or indirect result of this senseless war.  We see the abuses of Guantanamo and Abu Gharib, the massacre of Haditha, the torture of prisoners.  These outrages were committed on our dime and in our name.  When we questioned these abuses, we were accused of being unpatriotic, un-American, or Having Forgotten About 9/11.

 Over the years, 9/11 became a crutch for politicians.  Don’t have a plan?  Doesn’t matter, just repeat 9/11 a few times.  It was captured humorously in this Family Guy clip:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUTIPQxo21c.  Joe Biden wasn’t very far off when he said every sentence uttered by Rudy Guiliani contained three parts:  a noun, a verb, and 9/11.  The exploitation of 9/11 had begun to mutate and spread like a cancer.  Use it for justification of an invasion!  Use it to justify human rights abuses!  Use it as a substance substitute in political campaigns!   9/11 can do it all!  Now just $19.99 but if you call right now we’ll DOUBLE the offer!

 Let’s return to the present.  Now we’re using 9/11 as an excuse to restrict the First Amendment rights of some Americans.  It is somehow “insensitive” to have any type of Muslim building anywhere near Ground Zero.  Once again, the bloody shirt of 9/11 is being thrown as some sort of Ace of Trumps that wins every argument.  We have to be wary of all Muslims because of 9/11, regardless of sect, regardless of nationality.  An American cab driver in New York is stabbed for the crime of admitting to his religion.  A Nazi-style book burning of Qurans is planned.  Can stitched-on crescents and gas chambers be far behind?

 I think we have reached the point that Father Schmidt had warned me of.  September 11 has become our golden calf, our false idol.  We have sacrificed thousands of our servicemen and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians before it.  We have bankrupted our nation by waging useless wars and refusing to pay for them as a sacrifice upon its altar.  We have sacrificed our national reputation before it by condoning torture and rendition.  We have tossed habeas corpus into its flames.  We seem willing to sacrifice the Bill of Rights before it.  We wave it around like some magic amulet, using its mystical powers to win arguments and elections.  We no longer honor the dead, we exploit them.  The time has come to throw down the golden calf and stop exploiting these victims.    We have proven that we are incapable of remembering them with the dignity and honor that they deserve.  Perhaps they would be better off if we did not remember them at all.