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As a baby boomer I must confess that my outlook on life has never been the same since that day in Dallas in November of 1963. A complete distrust of the government has been my legacy from then on.
Subsequent events as well as a greater knowledge of history has done nothing but confirm my initial adolescent concerns.
Our nation has become, for all intents and purposes, an oligarchy of the priviledge classes and the "corporate citizens" working together for their own purposes, which by definition have only a passing concern with the welfare of "we the people". So long as there is sufficient wealth among the masses to consume the products churned out by the corporations which are in command.
The growth of the national security state (especially since the end of ww2) has nurtured a growing distrust of the government as 'national security' has come to be associated more with the concealment of grievious crimes carried out in the name of those who are sworn to uphold the constitution. The highly touted great triumph of the democratic system in exposing the Watergate scandals has proven over time to have been a chimera. It did not prevent even greater abuses by future administrations involving illicit drug, arms and money laundering, secret deals with enemy states, domestic election rigging, illegal wars, and of course the 911 state terrorism of the current Bush administration.
This defining historical event seems destined to pass into our national mythology pretty much as the government insists it happened. The fifth anniversary provided a plethora of media events designed to embed the official story in the collective consciousness. The continuing voices of "conspiracy theories" (which Geroge W. Bush was quick to dismiss in his address to the nation) will continue into the future with little effect just as occurred after the JFK murder. No amount of circumstantial evidence or eyewitness testimony will ever be conclusive enough to do more than raise "significant doubts" about the official version. Our twenty-first century Pearl Harbor ( the twentieth century one was allowed to occur for politcal reasons as we now know beyond any doubt) will become another "day of infamy" in the US mythology as its political purposes are successfully implemented. We will be left with the same uneasy concern that something is rotten but that all we can do is to hold our noses.
America may continue to be a sham republic or it may unmask itself as a full blown fascist state. All the institutions of democracy so far remain but they function as mere window dressing. Power is in the hands of the corporate government and the citizen's participation in representative government is a mere formaliity as the issues and choices presented for debate are stage managed by the powers behind the scenes. Yes, the Michael Moore's and Noam Chomski's are tolerated because thir voices are easily drowned out and marginalized. We no longer have a free press (one of the neccessities of a democratic system). Soon the free discourse of the internet will succumb to corporate control as well as corporate entities seek new laws to ensure their hedgemony.
We who realize what has happened are powerless to resist. In the early days of the republic the right to bear arms may have been seen as a deterent to incipient tyranny but in our modern world, even if every citizen owned his own AK-47 and rose to resist the powers that be, what good would it do against the arnmed might of the state?
Americans are to fractured, misinformed, complacent, and lets face it, to uneducated by and large to even mount a concerted effort to revolt. Can anyone even envision our consumer population agreeing to a national strike in order to nonviolently demonstrate their discontent with the same fervor demonstrated by the citizens of Bolivia for example? I see this as the successful outcome of years of deliberate effort by the ruling elites.
911 stands as a tribute to the triumph of state terrorism to control world events and the perceptions of the masses in order to direct the flow of history toward the establishment of the nebulous, ubiquitous "New World Order". Who knows what this really means? Judging from past experience and those who are most zealous for its implementation one can only shudder!
In 1960 I and most of my generation were excited about the New Frontier rhetoric of our new, young president and the Peace Corps mentality that promised to go forth into the world and right the wrongs of the past and help the poor countries of the world overcome their problems in a spirit of charitable brotherhood. The unbriddled optimism of those days has long been devoured by the locusts of bitter experience. I doubt that we will ever see such days of innocent optimism again.
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