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Too Far and Not Far Enough
Posted on September 10, 2003 in Book of Days Campaign 2004 Recent Terrorism
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: Write about a time someone went too far.
The first time was when George W. Bush stole the presidency from Al Gore.
Then John Ashcroft told the FBI that terrorism would no longer be a priority: I guess he figured that with a Republican in office the militias would behave.
Then came that dread day of two years ago when a cabal of terrorists that the FBI had been told to stop watching hijacked four airliners and rammed three into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That was going way too far. My wife called me and told me to find a television set. I rushed across the street to Tim’s and arrived just in time to see the second tower pancake.
Lynn told me to call her mother in Maine just in case she hadn’t heard the news. My brother-in-law Paul answered the phone. I spent twenty minutes telling him the news, that the report that the towers had both fallen wasn’t an exagerration that I had seen it happen again and again in the replays.
Then Ashcroft and Bush seized the initiative. Bush, who had already gone back on his promise to be a “moderate president” with his selection of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld — among others — let his unelectable Fundamentalist prosecutor go. America started going too far with the Patriot Act and the arrest of untold hundreds or maybe thousands of men and women. To cover the fact that he and his attorney general had failed on a simple matter of law enforcement — that they’d let these friends of his friends the Bin Ladens go too far, Bush and Ashcroft started taking away civil liberties including habeas corpus and privacy — indefinitely. The Congress went too far by allowing this.
The Media went too far by broadcasting the scenes of the World Trade Center attack over and over again until people were crawling under their coffee tables, screaming as they thought they heard the Bernoulian screech of wind riding over the wings of jets plowing into their neighborhood. Every town in America went too far, protecting their courthouses, their fire stations, their speed traps against a statistically improbable terrorist threat.
Now we’ve squandered the budget surplus we had and invaded a country for no other reason than to seize control of its oil reserves. Here in California, we’ve gone too far by blaming our governor for the mess that Texas-based corporations and oil millionaires working in secret with the Vice President forced on us. We’re still carreening towards the precipice, still deepening the deficit, still waging war where it is not wanted, still making the name of America despised, still doing nothing to pay for everything. We didn’t go far enough to stop Bush from becoming president. If the People had put their foot down against the corporations, the media, and the Supreme Court, none of this would have happened.
We cannot go far enough to fix this. Start with your vote.
Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.
Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: I don’t remember.
