The Road to Recovery From 9/11

I finished watching 90 minutes of this "docudrama" and alternated between being bored and being frustrated, and will not watch any more of it. I was bored by the director's and/or editor's amateurish obsession with artsy framing shots of people's lower eyelids and nostrils. And bored by the interminable "smoke filled office" scenes. I was frustrated by the obvious political message of the producers.

Although not as bad (in those first 90 minutes) as I feared, it was still pretty bad in places. At least twice, characters voiced the opinion that "this was a different kind of war" and that our Constitutional freedoms (i.e. freedom from warrentless searches) were preventing us from "catching bad guys" and were keeping us from being safe.

If this really is the view of the majority of the country, the terrorists have already won. Even if it's not, those who hold and promote this view are veering perilously close to collaborating with the terrorists to sow terror.

Our Constitution was written in a time of extreme insecurity - we had just finished a bloody War of Independence - we were engaged in various frontier terrorist skirmishes - and we still existed at the mercy of many larger European nations. And, yet, our Founding Fathers still saw fit to list some of our most basic rights, in very clear language. For a country that survived that period, and survived the Civil War (which is quite definitively the worst tragedy this country has experienced, well surpassing 9/11) to pee its collective pants about "terror" just shows how far our country has fallen.

I hope to see it get back up again. Please remember to vote in the 2006 midterm elections, and vote for Senators and Representatives who will remember and support Congress's Constitutional role in restraining an out-of-control exectuve.