Bottom Left Politics

Other than being openly gay and being an open atheist (both of which come with their social consequences), another part of my life that really marginalizes me and pushes me to the fringe of society is the fact that I’m one of those infamous 9/11 truthers.

Now, I’m not over the top, like, say, Alex Jones.  I’m not a nut.  I don’t claim to know everything about 9/11, and I certainly make no formal accusations against the Bush Administration like some 9/11 truthers do.  The premise upon which my strong belief in a 9/11 truth investigation rests is that I don’t know.  And neither do you.  What we as Americans “know” is what the government and its puppet commission told us, which is that we were randomly breached by a group of terrorists wielding box cutters.  And, for most Americans, this is good enough.  There are those of us who refuse to accept the official story;  personally speaking, I don’t believe the official story any more than I believe in fairies, trolls, unicorns, or U.S. democracy.  This automatically makes me a lunatic by society’s standards.  I’m attacked from the Left and from the Right – why? – because I simply demand more answers.  Because I don’t accept what’s been force-fed down America’s collective throat by the same thugs who stole the 2000 and (probably) 2004 elections.  Because, even if the official story is true, I think we owe it to the thousands who died on 9/11, to the thousands of soldiers who have been killed in the resulting wars, to the thousands of civilians in the Middle East who have been butchered, and to the very idea that we live in a republic, to at least conduct a full (and fair) investigation of what happened on September 11, 2001.  Why is that so much to ask?

Of course, we’ll never get an investigation.  Much like the Kennedy assassination, 9/11 will go down in history as one of those events shrouded in mystery, rife with controversy.  People will occasionally furrow their eyebrows and then remind themselves that their government would never allow something like that to happen.  Only extremists believe in such nonsense.  9/11 truthers will continue to be labeled “conspiracy theorists.”  And everybody will go to sleep believing that the reality that a ragtag group of men muscled their way into cockpits and decimated two skyscrapers was just a flaw in security.  And maybe that’s what happened.  But there are many Americans, myself included, who have their doubts.

And we want answers.

There’s no better way to honor the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy than to conduct a new investigation into what really happened.  Before we can begin to understand the post-9/11 state of our republic, we have to understand what actually took place on that fateful September day.  For better or for worse.

The blogger, Kristofer Paul, can be reached at bottomleftpolitics@yahoo.com.