Today’s the anniversary of 9-12, which I celebrate each year by saying “Hey, cool! A day we can forget!”

I didn’t post a tribute to yesterday, though, because that’s a day that the families and friends of the 9-11 victims deserve to have for their private grief and mourning. Certainly, no American able to comprehend the news of that day will forget it, but I’m among probably a very small group who thinks it’s now past time that we stop honoring it by throwing more innocents into the volcano to appease those Rulers of the Clouds, the war profiteers and the politicians they rode in on.

My father died 14 months ago and who else remembers that? A 28 year Air Force veteran who served from Korea and the Berlin airlift through Vietnam. He was also flying missions over Laos secretly, while a Republican president was denying such illegal missions were taking place, and nobody remembers that either.

He got dosed with Agent Orange but when a class-action suit came around to cover the damages of exposed vets, he declined to take part. He spent the last 33 years of his life suffering from a neurological ailment that occasionally would get a temporary diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, but that’s just coincidental, to a scientist.

And when he died, the retirement income he and my mother subsisted on was slashed by nearly two thirds. For 28 years of service in defense of America. That, I’ll ‘never forget.’ I don’t belittle the families who lost loved ones on 9-11 if those loved ones never performed service that America benefited from, nor do I judge negatively those dead who made salaries three and four times greater for the important jobs they did.

I do occasionally wonder why those families were awarded millions as compensation while my Mom’s survivor benefits are so puny. But then, I never was much good at figuring out money where $2 + $2 = $5.

Yesterday, I heard the President say “Three years ago the struggle of good against evil was compressed into a single morning.” But I recall it in less political terms as the day that evil attacked the unaware. And though some good arose in the response to that tragedy, a hell of a lot more bad has happened since.

So I’m sticking to my goal of commemorating September 24th as the critical day to remember, because it’s the one most will forget to mourn.

September 11th was the day a group led by Osama Bin laden finally delivered on its 1996 declaration of war against the USA with the chief complaint being the ongoing presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia. September 24th was the beginning of America’s surrender of the vital civil liberties that made our country a leader among nations that champion the cause of freedom, and the ultimate surrender of America itself.

Government secrecy is the multibillion dollar growth industry now, which history has demonstrated repeatedly to be the silence where the biggest cancers grow. It prevents librarians from revealing things they need to in court appeals to restrain the worst of the Patriot Act, thus making legal challenges illegal. Can I explain that any clearer? No. Not without John Ashcroft’s permission.

Within six months, after routing the government most visibly shielding Al Qaeda, a closed-loop tape of Iraq intelligence swapping was begun that was designed to cover its most likely source - within the US government - just as was done with reports of Iraqi soldiers tossing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators that drove public support for the first war there, in 1991. With plenty of former generals, intelligence agents and diplomats screaming ‘Bullshit!’, each was discredited in turn by our new and secret government whose foreign policy and war decisionmaking powers exceeded the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Now our America resorts to torture, dismisses old allies, discredits the accuracy of accurate UN inspectors, goes to war to prevent weapons that didn’t exist, and says, “so what? it doesn’t matter”. Our America watches 350+ Belsan citizens slaughtered - including 150+ schoolchildren, and did anyone go to the Russian embassies to lay wreaths and fly flags at halfmast, like Russians did in response to 9-11? Not that anyone reported on the news. A genocide goes on in Sudan with ten times the victims we lost on 9-11, and America’s too busy defending an Olympic gymnast’s gold medal to give a shit.

The day before the President landed on an aircraft carrier just outside San Diego harbor to declare the Iraqi War over - 19 months after the 9-11 attacks - Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld announced our troops would be pulled out of Saudi Arabia, giving Osama Bin Laden one of the two main goals he was after. And America yawned again and said ’so what?’

For 28 years, my father flew missions to track and define and inhibit an enemy that built up a stockpile of 9,000 nuclear warheads. America doesn’t remember him and thinks even less of his widow. Then a criminal gangster whose powers were mostly charismatic influence exploits a few weaknesses in our strategic planning. With weapons that remain largely speculative, he’s enlarged by myth to a Super-Terrorist status rivalling Josef Stalin. And our response is to surrender freedoms, to trade in our compassion for other nations in their tragic moments and capitulation to that terrorist’s number one demand?

America was never beaten while my father served and thankfully, he was oblivious to the final indignities in his final days. He defended a great country for 28 years that never got beat, but was ultimately given away.

You may not remember that, but every day I ask myself what the point of his service was when the country he fought for is no more. Two weeks after 9-11, I’ll be commemorating ‘So What?’ Day in the ‘country formerly known as America. ‘

The ceremony will consist of people saying ‘Osama Bin Laden still runs free!’ Or ‘the unemployment’s worse!’ and ‘more children live in poverty!’ Or maybe they’ll yell ‘11,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed’ or ‘Tens of thousands of Black Americans were prevented from voting !’ They might even have the courage to say ‘the president’s men have blown the cover of an American spy!’ or ‘all the friends and family of the president are immensely richer because of this war with Iraq!’

And to each of these yells, I’ll shrug and say ‘So what?’ because it appears to be our new national anthem.