Five years ago the World Trade Center fell and the Pentagon burned. Like you, I remember where I was and what I was doing that morning, just like my parents remember when Kennedy was shot, when the first man stepped on the moon, when Saigon fell, when Nixon resigned.

I remember where I was and what I was doing and how I felt being a fire fighter watching other fire fighters die. I remember being angry, being frustrated because I was in Arizona and those who bore the same responsibility as I were in New York. I was ready to give all I have to defend my country, “My life for yours.” It was real to me then. It’s real to me now. When I attend classes on how to mitigate terrorist attacks, how to recognize secondary devices designed to kill first responders, when we study the effects of nuclear weapons, I am still ready, still willing, because those things are important. It sounds like the answer to an interview question, but I still believe in giving what I have so that others may live. I believe it, and so do all the firemen and policemen that I know. None of us like it much, don’t relish it, don’t roll around in it, but we all believe. And when you get right down to it, that kind of belief is what makes common people do uncommon things.

It’s been five years, and five years is a good long time in the context of human perception; looking back now at all the first responder classes, all the training, all the soul searching about moral imperatives, it seems like a very long time indeed. A long time and a long hard road both in a personal sense and in a social, cultural sense. For all that time and training, though, I have to ask myself if I or those around me are any better prepared, better equipped, better supplied to answer a call like 9/11, to truly “mitigate” a terrorist event. The answer, is a resounding “yes”—and an equally resounding “no.” There are no tools, there is no equipment, no flow chart, no command structure to answer a call like that. The building is on fire, you go in to look for victims. Hopefully, you get out before it collapses, but maybe you won’t. A jet aircraft full of fuel becomes a fireball downtown. You still go in. You still look for survivors. Hopefully, you get out. That, of course, is the “yes” part, and maybe that is the most important part. The women and men dedicated to serving you and protecting you are still willing and ready to do what they have promised. If there is a silver lining in all of this terrorism business, that is it. Without any doubt or hesitation, the firemen and policemen of the Quad-Cities are a dedicated bunch. You will find no finer people anywhere.

Still, the twists and turns of the last five years, while certainly interesting, brought about certain circumstances, certain conditions that we should examine in the clearer light of time and distance. We were attacked. We were afraid. We responded. Now it’s time to ask where we are today and what we have gotten for our efforts. Five years ago the World Trade Center came down, and we felt shock, fear, anger and, perhaps most important, confusion. What was the purpose? What was the end? What was the motivation? Our response was just what it needed to be. National outrage. Nationwide rallying. Cultural support and sympathy. We made our speeches, our plans, our threats. We also kept going.

Four years ago we went to war, and I think most of us were OK with that. After all, wounds don’t heal overnight, bleeding can go on for a long, long time, and a people aroused in anger will likely respond in anger. It was time to seek our vengeance, to extract our pound of flesh, our 3,710 pounds of flesh, as it were. So, like our great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents we marched off to war to defend our nation from the threats of dictatorship, unchecked theocratic nationalism, weapons of mass destruction and religious extremism. Noble causes, all. Not unlike freeing Europe from the extremism of the 1930s and 40s. We marched off to war because there were people out there who did not like us very much, who possessed the kind of weapons that could do away with our nation and our people, and that is a powerful kind of motivation. We went after a vicious dictator. We liberated a nation held under the oppression of religious mania. We went to set free those who sought to breathe that still-sweet air of freedom and choice. At least that is what we were told.

I’m no political theoretician, don’t work for Rand, the Center for Strategic Planning, or any of the other places where experts gather to look at what is happening in our world and to try to puzzle it out. I didn’t attend an Ivy League school, don’t hold an advanced degree in political science. I’m just a guy, just like the guy across the street from you, the one who gets into his car every morning and goes to work, plays with his kids on the weekends, drinks a beer now and then, and watches Florida stomp the beans out of Ohio on the football field. I’m no different from the person who checked out your groceries or teaches your kids the ABCs, or made your coffee this morning. Why does my opinion matter? For the same reason that your opinion matters. I vote. I have eyes, and in spite of the lack of pedigree I, like you, can see what is happening and that the sky is not orange like we have been told.

So, where are we now, five years after 9/11, four years after going to war?

We have gone from billions of dollars in surplus to even more billions in debt. We started out on the hunt for the man responsible for the crime against humanity five years ago. When that didn’t work out our president declared that we were instead after weapons of mass destruction—chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, biological weapons that were just lying around in piles waiting to be hurled at us like stones from a highway overpass. (No one bothered to ask why we weren’t going after the brutal dictator in North Korea who was starving his people and stating flatly that he had those kinds of weapons and was happy to sell them to whomever would pay the most for them.) When that didn’t work out, our military shifted to overthrowing brutal dictators who do business in oppression and murder. (No one bothered to ask why we weren’t invading countries in Africa or South America where brutality has been a daily occurrence throughout history.) When that fell apart, as it was bound to, our war instead became about liberating the world from the grip of terrorism, and while that was about as good a goal as any, we forgot that the people doing the terrorizing were doing a better job of looking out for their own than we could.

We hanged a man who was as brutal a man as ever lived, who was as oppressive as any villain our world has ever faced. Of course, with his brutality, he was better at keeping the peace between people who want to annihilate each other than we will ever be. They say, “Education is a journey, not a destination,” and I would say that we have learned much since those dark days. We have learned again that hearts and minds—not tanks and rifles and grenades and the blood of our young—win hearts and minds. We have learned again that you cannot win a war in the air, you have to hold on to the ground beneath, and that when you take ground and then leave that ground, you don’t control it anymore and will have to take it again and again. Too bad those were repeat lessons. We have learned that a public that does not support a sitting president without question is an unpatriotic public, that support for our elected officials should trump our understanding of the world we live in. Never mind that our nation was founded on the basis of dissent against a sitting government, that the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War and the Constitution were the epitome of disagreement with a standing ruler. Back in the day, we called those men who forged our nation, who led the dissent, who rose up in protest, Patriots. Why are those who disagree today not patriots? The idea of “no-bid contracts” is part of our cultural lexicon now because Halliburton and Vice President Dick Cheney said that it should be so—that no one should question or look too closely at what they were doing or how they were doing it because we should just trust. The Government Accounting Office now estimates that billions of dollars are simply unaccounted for.

Our nation has learned about the subtleties of intelligence gathering, about information obtained under duress. We have learned about America’s secret prisons, rendition and imprisonment without trial. Since when does the United States of America torture prisoners? Since when do we not afford to all people the basic human rights we espouse in all of our national documents? Did we not condemn the Soviet Union for its secret prisons, its gulags where, for generations, dissidents disappeared? Did we not proclaim the outrage of all civilization when the Soviets staged kangaroo courts where the outcomes were never in question? What of the torture and humiliation our own soldiers endured in the hands of the Vietnamese? How long and how loud was our cry of immorality? What conditions exist now that make torture and human degradation acceptable to a people who preach liberty and justice for all? The right to trial by jury; the right of habeas corpus; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—what of these? Are they only so much window dressing, convenient words?

Our president taught us that he has the authority to listen to our phone calls. Most of us didn’t say much because he said they were only listening to phone calls from suspected terrorists, and as much as we didn’t like the idea it made a certain kind of sense: why offer terrorists the place and space to make their plans? Except that it wasn’t just a few terrorists or suspected terrorists, it was millions of people just like you and me, like the guy across the street or the woman in the office next to you, the one with two kids and a bag of soccer balls in the back of her car. That is when we all learned about the FISA court and about warrants for wire tapping and that our president fancies that he doesn’t need a bunch of legal crap to get what he wants. A nation at war is at the mercy of its leaders and should yield at every turn.

Americans as a whole want desperately to believe in the government. We elect politicians, and if we don’t trust them what does that say about all of us? We want to support those who go forth to make decisions that bear Herculean weight, where lives hang in the balance. We want to give our faith and our approval to those who represent us even when it becomes clear that they don’t.

As a last measure, we now know that our president and those who support him believe that the letters you send to friends and family are not private, but are his domain. Those in favor will point out that the government has always had the right to open mail and that this is nothing but an extension of that basic proviso extended to a president during a time of war. Those in opposition will remind us that such an action, like tapping phone calls, requires a warrant even if the people in charge do not think it should.

So where are we?

We are five years down the road. Are we safer? There haven’t been any more attacks on our country, and those who work in the alphabet soup of Washington will doubtless argue that this lack of activity is a result of diligent work and meaningful intelligence. Of course, no one knows if the acronym societies are responsible or if terrorists realized that their work here is finished and nothing else need be done.

We’ve traveled a long and difficult road as a people, as a nation, as a culture. We have wandered from the path of truth and justice and honor and peace. Those who seek to hurt us, to tear our nation apart, have done a handy job of it. Our phones are not private. Our letters are not private. We sequester prisoners in secret places without due process. We torture. We convolute truth and trust and we condemn those who dare speak against it. That long road has taken us far from “the land of the free and home of the brave.” If it is true that terrorists, whatever that may mean, hate freedom and want to destroy our democratic culture, then they have done just that, because we have not been brave, our leaders have cowered. Our own leaders have stripped us of the very freedoms that we must keep, that hundreds of thousands have died to protect, that our very nation was founded upon. They have taken your freedoms and you will not ever get them back.

I am not a soldier, but I go forth day in and day out knowing that if something terrible happens in our community I and others like me will be the first to die. I have not been to Iraq or Afghanistan, but my brothers and I fight the war at home every day. Knowing what it means, I can say with confidence that I would rather die in the blast of a terrorist bomb than live in a country where the government has taken away my freedoms. I would rather my children die free in a free country than live scared, cowed into submission by a society that is too afraid to live by the words it speaks.

I think that Lavrentii Beria, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Mussolini, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Charles Taylor, Slobodan Milosevic, would all be very impressed by how the present administration and its supporters have undercut our freedoms. They would all be very impressed by our domestic intelligence gathering apparatus. They would all bow at how our government has spied on us and how we have let it.

The terrorists have won so far. You enjoy fewer freedoms today then you did five years ago. You have been told to live in fear of your neighbors and been asked to spy on them. You have been told that to object is to deny your country your love and support. We have been told that the sky is orange when we can all see that it is not.

(Mark lives and works in Prescott. You can contact him at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it )