Not BST

I know it's supposed to be Body Shot Tuesday, but I didn't feel like that was appropriate, given the significance of this day. All the way to work today, I passed flags at half staff and BST just doesn't seem to fit with that. So, not this week; come back next Tuesday.

But I also have to vent the rant that today has raised in my own mind. We were attacked, yes, but the powers-that-be decided to retaliate for that attack by going after a country that had no real connection to it. Today, six years after the attack, we're now "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here." As if people who fly airplanes into buildings are willing to only fight one battle in one place at a time. Today, six years after we were attacked, we're a country that is uniformly reviled in the world, the person who masterminded the attacks is still at large, the group responsible still continues to grow and terrorism is a worse problem in the world today than it was six years ago. Today, six years after we were attacked, the freedoms we enjoyed that helped to make us a target in the first place have been drastically eroded by the very government sworn to protect them. The security that our citizens feel has not been at a lower level in decades and meanwhile more than 3,700 more of our citizens have died in that time supposedly fighting to correct all those problems. In essence, the terrorists who attacked us succeeded not only in their physical goals of destroying real estate and lives but in their political goals of recruiting more zealots to their cause and of destroying our country and its freedoms. Our government handed them those political successes. And all along we are told that we should "stay the course"? Staying this course is sure to tear our ship of state asunder on the jagged shoals of egotism, greed, zealotry and power-hunger.