If 9/11 happened today

Friday 9/11/26

I regard people who make 9/11 jokes as being dead inside. Inhuman humans. Incapable of empathy. Most people aren't empathetic, because empathy requires imagination and effort. You have to decide to try and use your mind to go into someone else's life and experience and feel what that feels like. Empathy doesn't just happen. It's consciously strove for.

On a day like today, the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, you can't escape the imagery and the testimonies unless you're offline, and who's that? Is that anyone under the age of seventy? And it's not that many people over that either, though my mother is one.

I was reading this account of people in a helicopter seeing people in one of the towers hugging each other before jumping to their deaths.

That's just...

How can you even process that level of horror? These were just people having gone to work like so many other days in their lives. After making breakfast for their kids, kissing their spouse goodbye. And they never got to come home again. Just hours later after saying "Have a good day" to their kid they could have been hugging a stranger whose name they didn't know and jumping to their death so they didn't have to be burned alive.

The level of evil...the evil that humans are capable of...to put such things in motion...again, how can you even process that?

Then you see and read about the accounts of how people came together. That was a different world. We were nearing the edge that we'd soon fall over in triggering our destruction, the extirpation of our own humanness, with the rise of the internet, phones, screens. But it hadn't happened yet. It was coming. My goodness was it coming.

I think we're more at risk today than we were then. We're more vulnerable. If something like this happened today you'd have many people who only cared insofar as what they could do with that thing to try and get what they wanted for themselves.

Followers. Attention. The scoring of political points.

I know so few of us have souls now. I know human hearts are on their last legs when they're on any legs at all. And I know we don't have minds. I know we only care about ourselves. To the detriment of ourselves and our own lives, ironically, but we're too stupid and unthinking to have any inkling that's what's happening.

The wedges need not be driven because they're already there. A foe could expand them without much effort. Then again, that's what already happens from within. With our politicians, our tech. Wedge drivers. Do we have the ability to come together now? We're so disconnected. Think about that: we are easily in touch with each other. We can reach out to strangers and they to us and we can cease being strangers and become whatever we might be.

We grow grudges instead of relationships. We say we're protecting our peace when we're really isolating. We marinate in anger. Bounce harder and more violently off of our own metaphorical walls cursing that which is outside of them. I don't know that this country would come back from something like this today. It'd carry on. But look at COVID. The country didn't come back from that. And it was like the flu. I know, I know--deadly plague and all that. But still.

So many of us are in effect cultists as it is. Cult joiners. Millions will sign up for and stump for evil cults that hurt and seek to control people. MAGA. Or would it be some news cycle story, grist for the dystopian mill, with a "shelf life" of a week, two weeks tops, or until the clicks started to dry up and whatever else came along to have its brief run and reign?