Never Forget 9/11... But Start Living Like It's 9/12

When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills--an old Chinese proverb

I have very vivid and first-hand memories of 9/11... most of the New Yorkers I once knew did too. I remember that I was working on a film shoot deep in the heart of Brooklyn... and I remember the surreal snowfall of ashes that floated down on our crew as we tried, for a few hours anyway, to continue on with our day. I remember walking towards Manhattan, and my home, like the sole salmon swimming upstream against an apocalyptic current of the masses fleeing that history-changing scene. And I watched, from my bedroom window, the ruins burn and smoulder for days on end... and won't easily forget the smell that lingered in the air for too many months thereafter...

But see, I moved past 9/11 long long ago... and I believe most New Yorkers did too. Which is why it so puzzles, and deeply troubles me, this unwillingness (or inability) of others in our nation, who weren't even there, to do the same. You can hear it in the cries of "Terrorist!" at our campaign rallies... and smell it, that stench of Fear, in the rise of a new form of McCarthyism in our country, this "Us" vs. "Them", "Pro-America" vs. "Anti-America" talk that frankly, shames us all... and keeps us in a lock-step march headed straight towards ruin, on every front that truly matters, and far far away from the Middle East.

There's this mind-altering book I'm currently reading called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--And How It Can Renew America. I will be blogging about it. A lot. This post is just a teaser, really, for what's to come.

Because the book is 412 pages long... and as much as I love blogging and sharing this stuff with y'all, I do have a life. Well... in theory, anyway.

And so do you. Which is why I'll share these thoughts piecemeal, on a need-to-know basis. Given the crucial election we face in just 8 days, I do want y'all to think, though, on this one passage:

"The other disturbing trend has been building slowly since the 1980s. It is a "dumb as we wanna be" mood that has overtaken our political elite, a mood that says we can indulge in petty red state-blue state catfights for as long as we want and can postpone shoring up our health care system and our crumbling infrastructure, postpone addressing immigration reform, postpone fixing Social Security and Medicare, and postpone dealing comprehensively with our energy excesses and insecurity--indefinitely. The prevailing attitude on so many key issues in Washington today is "We'll get to it when we feel like getting to it and it will never catch up to us, because we're America."

But, as the author himself puts it, "We have been living for far too long on borrowed time and borrowed dimes."

The Urgency of Now... we've heard that phrase before in Election 2008. So enough with all these "walls"... right? Let's all start thinking, instead, upon how to build some "windmills"...

Otherwise, we as a nation are going to feel like Bill Murray, reliving Groundhog Day... But for the rest of our lives...