“It’s all a lie!”  The lady was adamant.  She was angry.  I could tell by her dress, her hair style and her mannerisms that she was Pentecostal, a member of a Christian denomination marked by plain dress as well as a particular interpretation of scripture and the practice of “speaking in tongues.”  Having attended a church with similar though less strict beliefs and having visited the particular denomination the woman must have been from I knew that she had no room in her world for aliens.  Not real ones.  No doubt she entered the UFO Museum in Roswell with family and like most who visit thought it was just a big joke.  At that time in 2000 the Museum had collections of evidence and documentation on display that made it very clear the Museum was no joke.  The Museum’s exhibits were very convincing.  Convincing enough to make most people question the possibility and make others true believers.  But the Pentecostal faith fits in well with Fundamentalism in attitude—if not practice—and it was fundamentalist Jerry Falwell who said his faith is a lie even if microbial life is found outside our little planet.  So the lady was upset and angry at the possibility that her little world was larger and, no doubt, darker than she imagined it.

At the time, I didn’t know how she felt.  I thought she was acting silly.  A faith that is so small it doesn’t allow for the possibility that a God big enough to create the whole infinite universe might have created life outside this tiny back-water planet is a faith that needs to be re-examined.  That’s easy for me to say but she—and Falwell—live that faith and it’s no small thing to them.  But I have had my head in outer space since I was a kid so I’d long ago reconciled faith and the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  I couldn’t understand how unnerving it was for the very foundations of her life to be shaken not by absolute evidence but by a sufficient amount of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, eyewitness testimonies and corroborating information which strongly implied that something unknown and disturbing exists outside the box.  I understood the source of her anguish but could not be empathetic.

My anguish is not about alien life.  All the Roswell evidence aside, common sense says that life outside our sphere must exist.  No, my distress is from something more immediate, more close to home, more related to and anchored in the reality I grew up in.  My angst comes from a realization that the America I’ve believed in all my life, the one in my head, does not exist.  The real one, the one “out there,” is a very different thing, full of darkness and shadows and vast empty spaces.  Since September 11, 2001, I, like the dear lady who struggled with ET, struggle with “a sufficient amount of circumstantial and anecdotal evidence, eyewitness testimonies and corroborating information which strongly implies that something unknown and disturbing exists outside the box.”   MY box is cracked open now and I don’t like it one bit.

There are those who have forever cried the sky is falling, the end is coming, life as we know it is an illusion.  Movies, books, and sermons have often spoken the possibilities.  As a college graduate who spent years studying American history and government I always knew there was more to what went on in D.C. than the average Joe knew about.  But the things that rock my boat now are not the shenanigans of F.D.R., keeping knowledge of an impending Japanese attack a secret or the ridiculously staged Gulf of Tonkin incident or even the Watergate or Drugs-for-Guns scandals.  No, those are things presidents do to manipulate the population a little this way or that, or to get a dirty little deed done.  Those—sad but true—were business as usual.  The waves threatening my skiff, however, are much higher and much uglier.  Though I keep my bow into the wind, slipping over each successive wave becomes more difficult, more nightmarish, made even more so because the vast majority of the American public ride the waves like zombies, unaware the waves are there at all.  They are, like those church goers in the classic War of the Worlds, safe within their small universe until the ugly creature from outer space crushes their sanctuary, both literally and figuratively. 

My world came to an end September 11, 2001.  The one I want to live in.  The illusion.  The “Truman Show” kind of place where all is peaceful and people are nice.  My world began to crumble the minute the Twin Towers crumpled to the ground, hiding the truth forever beneath thousands of tons of rubble.  My fear is not based on worries of another “attack.”  I know and have always known in my heart that there is not and never has been a “Terrorist Threat.”  I have traveled this country from one ocean to the other.  It is a wide open, free place.  Any organization that really wanted to destroy our balance through terrorism has always had the doors wide open.  Hundreds of thousands of trucks traverse this country with the deadliest of materials.  The possibilities are endless.  Anybody who wanted to do something drastic could easily do it.  They would not need to capture airliners and crash them into skyscrapers. 

There’s something else to 9/11, something different, something we’re not being told, something horribly wrong and out of place.  There must be.  It is only logical.  But the logic that leads to obvious conclusions is the logic that twists my head around and pulls my eyes out of their sockets.  Like the lady whose heart was wretched at the thought her faith might not define all of reality, in my mind I walk through the “museum” of our world torn with the knowledge that something is outside my box that I really, really do not want to exist.  But unlike the lady in Roswell, being who I am, I have no choice but to face those ugly fears and admit something is terribly wrong with the picture.

There are those who always try to find the worst in man, who dig for evidence of conspiracies, who want to prove “something evil this way comes.”  In modern vernacular, they are “Conspiracy Buffs.”  They get some kind of sordid pleasure in “revealing” the evils of society, in “proving” the existence of “secret governments” and a spooky underworld.  I don’t buy it.  If half what they claim is true, if there were such tight-knit cabals with such control and with such evil intentions, the world we live in would be a very different place.  I do not any more believe the conspiracy bologna about 9/11 than I do the official story.  I do not really know what to believe.  I just know the version of events we’ve been spoon-fed for years is as divorced from the realm of possibility as is the belief that residents of Zeta Reticuli have control of our government.  Nobody who really considers how ridiculous it is to believe a hand full of bungling ding-dong Arabs could emerge from Afghan caves, capture airplanes with box cutters (box cutters?!) and bring down the whole of American society can believe it.  But that’s the problem.  The only other option is NOT to believe and not to believe opens such a massive can of worms people can’t accept it so they choose not to consider anything at all.  I do so envy them that ability.

I have questions.  The Twin Towers could not have come down the way they did without being brought down with explosive charges.  Period.  So, who set the charges and why?  Building Seven was NOT hit with an airplane and was not doused with jet fuel so why did it come down (and who set those charges)? Why was the Pentagon hit where it would suffer the least damage?  Why not the Capitol or the White House?  That would have made much more sense and been just as easy.  How did the Patriot Act be written so quickly and why was it pushed through so fast, preventing most Congressmen and many Senators from even knowing what it said?  Who dreamed up Homeland Security and how long had the plans been on the table?  Where ARE all those terrorists we were warned against after 9/11?  What the hell is really going on?

I’m the kid who at a very young age would stand at attention before the TV after the evening news, saluting the waving flag, as the station “signed off” for the night.  I’m the one whose heart swelled so much it made me dizzy when we said the pledge in school or later when I stood among fellow Airmen in bare uniforms at Lackland while the flag was raised there.  I’m the Ranger leader who learned to sing the National Anthem, even the high notes, and put on such a presentation one Fourth of July the whole congregation was in tears.  And I’m the one whose guts have been ripped out ever since the dawn of the day when America turned ugly and then collapsed before my eyes on September 11, 2001.

Every time I hear or say that date I cringe.  It’s the point of the top around which our whole ghastly world turns.  I want my yesterday back.  But it’s not coming back.  Not ever.  If it was ever the yesterday I thought it was.  In the “Truman Show,” when Truman discovered he was in an artificial world, he escaped.  Even if he discovers the real world is horrible, he can’t go back to his days of innocence.  He knows.  Neither can I go back.  I know too much.  And I find it impossible to divorce what I know from the pretty pictures and the Hallmark Show moments where life is all peachy.  It isn’t.  The world isn’t about to succumb to a nasty New World Order.  The Big and Powerful might be big enough to manipulate Americans but they are far, far, far from powerful enough to rule the world.  This is no comfort, however.  It does not change the fact that some very mean and selfish people have done horrible things and have not been held accountable.  Dark shadows mark the land from the ghosts of the twin towers all the way to D.C. 

What I really want is for them all to just go away, who ever “they” are, and give us our country back.  I don’t even want to know who blew up the towers because then it would make everything way too real and there would be no turning back at all.  There won’t be anyway but let me have my illusion just a little while.  Let me have a walk in the park.  Join me.  But then let’s both wake up and do something about tomorrow.  We have a lot to do.  We have a planet set on roast, animals dying, population exploding, governments killing each other and their own citizens.  We have unscrupulous men in the Whitehouse and in the Congress who need to be replaced before they destroy what little is left for who knows what reasons. 

We have alliances forming between powerful countries getting ready to pop us in the collective mouth for trying to establish a Neo-Pax-Americana.  Who knows the truth about September 11?  What can we do about it now?  The absolute best thing is to admit it wasn’t a good day, we were lied to and manipulated and then move on.  Some day, maybe, there’ll be justice.  But in this real world, there usually isn’t.  The greatest punishment we as Americans can deal those who perpetrated the lies of 9/11, what ever those lies are, is to make sure they fail.  The way we do that is by waking up and taking this country back, not by ridiculous weblog rants or insult-the-president t-shirts or Impeach The President nonsense.

There’s a country song that goes, “God Bless America… Again!”  Want that?  Get the blinders off and admit we were lied to about 9/11 and the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and then go about bringing a halt to the madness rather than seeking revenge.  George Barnard Shaw said, “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”  We dread it almost as much as we dread being pulled from our little box and having to look Truth straight in the face.  So like the dear sad Pentecostal lady you and I just exclaim, “It’s a LIE!” and look away.  We return to our illusion.  But that illusion is going to come to an end.  What comes next may be far worse on our nation and our children than the proverbial UFO landing on the Whitehouse lawn ever will be.

…and it was.