Making it Real again

So many times I have found myself enraged during these past years over what has happened to America since the 2001 attacks.
The absolute worst of it has been what we have done to ourselves.

I remember nightmares of desperate arms reaching out for help only to realize they were frozen in death with rigor mortis. Jesus Christ, the terrible helplessness of it...
The worst nightmare was of paper airplanes sprinkled with poison floating around my parents' living room; The terrorists had dug trenches in the front porch & my child was vomiting while the Generals reassuringly watched CNN in the safety of the den. Yeah, remember anthrax?

If ever there was more of a grand scale tragedy so viciously exploited & trivialized by American politicians, I'd like to know what it was. I say 'trivialized' because, even in the historical contexts of the Alamo, Little Big Horn, the Maine, & Pearl Harbor, our politicians managed to direct resolve towards the Mexicans, the Sioux, the Spanish, & the Japanese, respectively. Can't say that about 9/11, can we? Precisely why I have bitterly contended that all that horror and death was for Nothing. All that flag waving and god bless America was meaningless because of how we responded. All of it bullshit.
That big dumb "cross" standing among the wreckage of the World Trade Center had far less to do with the sufferings of Jesus than figuring out who to nail to the motherfucking thing next. And how to maybe make a buck at it.

I write all of this fully aware of the emotional impact of slaughtering sacred cows & pissing on burning flags & our nada who art in nada & piercing the Queen's nose with a safety pin & Jerry Falwell fucking his mother in an outhouse...
The horror and the murder of that day might have better served this country if we had ignored it with the same effortless passion we are using to do nothing about the killings at the campus of Virginia Tech earlier this year.

I have said all of this in some form or another since this whole rotten war in Iraq began four years ago. Only tonight did I ever feel any regret over it. I can't apologise over what I believe is true, but I can't say it is trivial anymore though either. It turns out that it plays into another disgraceful and deliberate failure by our government - ignoring those still dying from the attacks the mysterious ailments from breathing the dust of the fallen towers that our government hurriedly declared to be safe.
It's not trivia to me that someone I enjoyed reading in the pages of Maximum Rock N Roll has set up a MySpace page asking for donations to help him survive. George Tabb would personally set teenage twerp punks straight on where punk rock was born and he could make you laugh even while you endured an insult. George Tabb and Mykel Board were the writers who gave me an idea what was happening in New York after the days of Blondie and the Ramones and Television and the Heartbreakers. It was exciting to know it still thrived.

I remember in the dreams about the outstretched arms, grabbing hold of a cold wrist and realizing it was too late to save this person. I wasn't sure what to do next - struggle to pull the corpse out and put it somewhere out of the way out of respect for the dead, or let it go and concentrate on the desperate hope of finding someone still alive. I remember the growing sense of futility, like some towering depression, that any of these arms pleading for help might still belong to anyone alive.
All I can do right now to help George Tabb and others like him is remind anyone still having similar dreams that there are still survivors reaching out among the dead.
I owe him for making it real to me again, not trivial.