QUOTE : When 9/11 happened, I was an observer. I mourned for the victims and felt for the people as individuals, but this wasn’t my fight. It wasn’t the victims’ fight, either, though. They were caught in the middle as always. The little people suffer for the crimes of few. This fight wasn’t between the people that flew the planes and the people in the towers. We all got played by politics we had nothing to do with. In the aftermath of 9/11, if you tuned in to television stations and watched the debates over the war in Iraq, no one had the backbone to point out the obvious. America, Inc. was running out of gas. We’d squeezed everything we could out of the rest of the world with our foreign policy. The answer was not to go into Iraq. It should have been to look at ourselves, look at our own crumbling policies, and economic mishaps. We should have lowered the debt, regulated the banks, prevented the oncoming mortgage crisis, and reevaluated our foreign policy, but we didn’t. We played on the fear of innocent Americans and spent our resources on a nameless, faceless war that tore apart Iraq, emptied our war chest, and left us with an American infrastructure screaming for help. We didn’t look at ourselves until it was too late. We spent our money on an arms race against ourself, fought an unnecessary war, and neglected the problems we had on this side of the water’s edge.