WILLIAMSVILLE — It's been raining for days now, and the gloom of these post-Irene days reminds me of the autumn following the fall of the Twin Towers, when anthrax was in the mail and the whole country seemed under attack and largely helpless, despite the saber-rattling and new, sweeping authority of airport security.
Cement posts and no-parking zones blocked access to every post office in the country, including the one in my village at the postmistress's home. Terrorist alerts were the color of foliage even after the blaze of color fell from the trees.
But we got used to it, and to the PATRIOT Act. The whole nation shifted right. The war started: a spectacle on TV, where the journalists were embedded with the military. Not exactly sleeping with the enemy, but not exactly maintaining objectivity, either. Would the military hold an inquiry if a journalist took a bullet in the back?
One war, then another.
For a month or two, all the headlines were about the price of gas, as if more important than the First Amendment is unlimited unleaded in every super-sized car. After a while, the pictures from the front started to look normal, and then they disappeared, replaced by electioneering, and then a remarkable revival of interest in politics, an election based on change.
But nothing changed.
The outgoing party stole all the favors and the incoming one took all the blame. In eight years, the so-called fiscal conservatives toppled a surplus and dug a debt all the way to China, which now owns the world.
It's a testament to the poverty of public education that Americans have neither memory nor logic. Michelle Bachmann says into the Congressional Record that because carbon dioxide is natural, it's also good.
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It's now 10 years later, and America is getting misty-eyed about the World Trade Center.
I've never liked our bellicose reaction, or our strong-arm approach to foreign policy, which has bankrupted our treasury and wrought havoc on the world. But it was never so clear to me just how wrong war is until Irene came plowing through my village, which looks like it's been bombed.
The day after the storm was sunny but surreal. Utility poles canted sideways, their wires drooping into a stream raging where the road used to be.
Houses wrecked. Parts of houses disappeared. Acres of land washed away. Three days after the storm, a man appeared in my village without shoes. His house and all his belongings had been washed away.
The United States military does this kind of damage to small villages - deliberately, every day.
I can forgive Irene. She's just proof that Nature is always stronger than mere mortals. Nature is canny about following the incontrovertible laws: water always follows the path of least resistance. It always runs downhill.
But deliberately destroying homes? Scorching the earth, poisoning wells, wrecking livelihoods? Making destruction the foreign policy of the richest nation in the world?
This I can no longer forgive.