A Letter of Apology to My Grandson: 'It’s Not the World I Wanted to Leave You'
NEWS & POLITICS
A Letter of Apology to My Grandson: 'It’s Not the World I Wanted to Leave You'
Our world is a far more screwed up, degraded place.
By Tom Engelhardt / TomDispatch April 23, 2015
Dear Grandson,
.............
The Future Foreseen
Back in 2001, before I even imagined a grandson in my life, I had one of those moments (and wish I hadn’t). It was sometime just after the 9/11 attacks when, nationwide, Americans were still engaged in endless rites in which we repeatedly elevated ourselves to the status of the foremost victims on the planet, the only ones that mattered. In those months, you might say, we made ourselves into Earth’s indispensible or exceptional victims.
In that extended moment of national mourning (combined with fear bordering on hysteria), the Bush administration geared up to launch its revenge-fueled global wars, while money started pouring into the national security state in a historically unprecedented way. It was a time when the previously un-American word “homeland” was being attached to what would become a second defense department, secrecy was descending like a blanket on the government, torture was morphing into the enhancement of the week in the White House, assassination was about to become a focus (later an obsession) of the executive branch -- and surveillance? Don’t even get me started on the massively redundant domestic and global surveillance state that would soon be built on outright illegalities and rubber-stamp legalities of every sort.
In October 2001, I had no way of grasping most of that, but it didn't matter. I peered into the future and just knew -- and what I knew chilled me to the bone. I had mobilized decades earlier as part of the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era, which was in its own way a terrible time, but when I looked at where our country seemed to be heading, as the president promised to kick some ass globally and American bombs began to fall on Afghanistan, I had no doubt that this was going to be the worst era of my life.
I wasn’t, of course, thinking about you that October and November. You were then minus 11 years old, so to speak. I was, however, thinking about your mother and your uncle, my children. I was thinking about the world that I and my cohorts and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of that crew were going to leave them.
..................
......if this country of mine, and someday yours, could be put on the couch, I suspect it would, in layman’s terms, be diagnosed as “disturbed” (on an increasingly disturbed planet). Worst of all, we can evidently no longer see what actually threatens us most, which isn’t a bunch of jihadis, but what we are doing to our ourselves and our world.
.........
the rest
really well written (especially since i am a gamma):
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/letter-apology-my-grandson-its-not-world-i-wanted-leave-you
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