I can't disassociate the right-wing takeover of America from the tragedy of 9/11.  Within 24 hours, the security lapses Bush allowed on that day were used to push tax cuts for the wealthy, and our business elite used 9/11 as an opportunity to steal from investors and undermine American markets.  The event was used to justify a ghastly and immoral war, and to concentrate power in the executive branch at the expense of the idea that is America.  The press has been completely cowed to the point of uselessness, and the Republican Party turned into a group of cruel and treacherous eunichs who consistently call for a security state.

I am by nature a hopeful person, and I can see paths out of where we are, a way for America to restore its moral universe.  But to me, someone who didn't really know anyone killed in the towers, I am compelled to remember the events of 9/11 by Bush's call for all of us to go shopping in response.  Progressives will spend our lives working to fill that moral vacuum, but many of us will need to be held to account for not speaking out, for being silent and cooperative in the travesty that continues to this day.  Like with Katrina, it is a silent rage I feel, an anger that these people I deal with every day mock the country I love, and do it while wearing the flag, while behind closed doors they engage in the organized evil political Bacchanalia that destroyed Rome.

The American people must rise up and reclaim the country, in bars and over dinner tables.  If that doesn't happen, and the country continues its obsession with the security state and the clearly fraudulent war on terror, that day is the end of America.  I don't believe that this is the case, I think we can take back our party, our churches, and our country if we want to.  But evil is banal, and evil is hypocritical, and evil lives deeply in our hearts and in our culture.  I took this picture at Pier 39 in San Francisco, and to me, it's what we're fighting, the feel-good sense of self that lets us ignore our blaring moral sirens.