9 years later

Part of me wants to say "holy crap its been 9 years?" but part of me is also starting to feel distance from the issue and event, so perhaps I really can believe its been 9 years. It does kind of bother me though that there is still an active war that is still ongoing and most Americans for the most part seem to have forgotten, or at least aren't consciously aware that the threat is still out there. Go to the Huffington Post some time and you will read pieces about how it was all a lie, or that it was a conspiracy or that we overreacted. Listen to some folks and you'll STILL hear the "truther" movement echoing with just the faintest hint of legitimacy.

I tired, really I tried, to watch Loose Change. I would like to be able to hear all sides of an issue, but i found the whole thing so ignorant that it made me want to scream. I try to watch all the "ah-HA!" moments, and what you end up with is a whole case built on the most insanely circumstantial evidence and the conspiracy gets ever more vast, complicated and in the end you have this leviathan that simply could not exist in the real world.

I believe that the people who continue to believe this are not bad people necessarily (there are some methodology I'd argue against, and there are always a few lunatics) but I also don't believe that it is as representative of the population as they would like to believe. So how do these amazing and vast conspiracies come to form? Well I think part of it is denial. Its is hard to believe that one man in the 9th floor of a book depository could possible be so accurate and fire so well, and really cause so much damage to the national psyche. Likewise it is hard to believe that 19 pissed off Muslims that trained in a cave in one of the poorest countries in the world could have the wherewithal to cause so much destruction. To people that believe such things I would say that a truly motivated man can do things that defy imagination.

as for how the buildings fell, the Airplanes hitting the towers flight 93 being staged (I talked to workers in the area who didn't hear it but there's a lot of science you'd have to go into to explain why they wouldn't hear it.) I have to ask one simple question. If all this was planned out, either by a singular individual of a shadowy cabal. . . with all the support required (and remember the more elaborate you get the more support you have to have) knowing all this, and that there is always SOMEONE that talks. . . why haven't we gotten conclusive proof of this conspiracy? We have clear video evidence of both planes hitting the WTC. the first strike is a little harder to see but it is quite clear. we have moderate quality footage of the plane hitting the Pentagon, and of all those crashes pointed to as evidence for why 93 is not how people say it is. . . have you honestly ever seen an airplane hit the ground at over 500MPH? most crashes are at Landing or take off, so using them for evidence is pretty well shot.

As for the question "where are all the pieces?" Aluminum is pretty sturdy but its nothing compared to steel. With enough speed and force wings, engines tails etc will shred like tissue paper. structural integrity for say a civilian passenger liner is not nearly as much concern as for say a fighter aircraft. At most a 757/767 is expected to pull 3-4 g's and that's an "oh shit" moment, and really its not expected to do that for long. Were you to somehow find a way to break the sound barrier with a 757 the airplane would literally tare itself apart, so its no wonder that these planes have little remaining pieces.

I could go on for hours I think about these myths. The problem I have is that anyone, especially rational people would give these awful thoughts anymore than lip service. And if by some chance there truly WERE this shadowy cabal that everyone thinks is in power, well that paints a really terrifying view of the world I choose not to believe in. It also presupposes that America is a generally bad place and bad country. If we really are the "bully" it is because we are always trying to do the right thing and always taking an ethnocentric view of life. However despite the disastrous errors that can happen in both foreign and domestic policy, isn't it simpler to explain this through incompetence and negligence rather than Malice?

why can we not memorialize this day without controversy? Why can't we have unity like we did on 9/12/01? is it really so bad that we have to tare each other apart over minutiae?