When We Finally Grow Up...

and learn to take responsibility for the consequences of our own actions at home and abroad, we will acknowledge the tragedy of September 11, 2001 as a 21st century version of Nat Turner's slave rebellion.

Unfortunately, we have no true moral leadership in this country's government; bluster and posturing passes for courage these days; threats and photo-ops on aircraft carriers.

In the days following the tragedy, what we needed was sober assessment: of the crime that was committed and the degree to which conditions for which we ourselves are responsible contributed to the inevitability of that crime's commission. What we got instead was our Cheerleader-in-Chief standing at Ground Zero with a bull-horn doing the only thing he has ever been successful at doing: shouting, "Rah Rah Rah! Sis Boom Bah! Hit 'Em Back! Hit 'Em Back! Rah Rah Rah!"

And so one criminal act was replied to with a series of retaliatory criminal acts that continue to this day. The United States government: Black House, Transgress, Supine Court, and Satanic Pentagon, have no moral legitimacy whatsoever. All they have is political power.

It is most instructive to read the statement of T. R. Gray, published as a preface to the alleged "confessions" of Nat Turner. Entitled "To the Public" and dated November 5, 1831, this piece of condemnatory prose demonstrates the moral stupefaction that afflicted the slave-holder class of ante-bellum America. That same moral stupefaction afflicts the globalizing American plutocracy today: smug, clueless, outraged by the impudence of an underclass that would dare to raise a defiant hand against its masters and do so with a claim to Divine guidance.

Sound familiar? It gets better. Gray describes bin Laden--I mean, Nat Turner--as "a gloomy fanatic...[who conceived] in the recesses of his own dark, bewildered and overwrought mind schemes of indiscriminate massacre...[s]chemes too fearfully executed as far as his fiendish band proceeded in their desolating march. No cry for mercy penetrated their flinty bosoms. No acts of remembered kindness made the least impression upon these remorseless murderers. Men, women and children, from hoary age to helpless infancy, were involved in the same cruel fate. Never did a band of savages do their work of death more unsparingly...."

Until 9/11/01.

I hold no brief for the murderers of 9/11, nor for Nat Turner and his crew. But I understand a thing or two about human beings. And I know the world we inhabit is not composed of the guys with the white hats and the guys with the black. There's a whole lot of gray in the world; and those who cannot understand or accept it and learn to cope with it charitably become Nat Turners, bin Ladens, and George Bushes.

I look forward to the arrest and trial of OBL and the arrest and trial of GWB.