This morning I got in a cab and told the driver to take me to Ground Zero. The trip from midtown to downtown took perhaps twenty minutes, and then we were on a familiar street, yet unfamiliar at the same time because there was nothing in front of us but sky and a metal fence where there should have been–
The driver, an Arab, said nothing as he pulled up to the curb before the fence. The fare was ten something, I was so mesmerized by what I saw — or more accurately what I didn’t see, the entire area looked suddenly alien to me and I actually felt momentary fear for some reason I can’t fathom, I handed the cabbie a twenty, got out of the taxi and walked slowly to the fence, to that great cavity beyond that simply didn’t belong anyplace in my memories, didn’t belong in New York and I gazed out upon it, my emotions a mess so that I actually wanted to cry — but didn’t, I just looked and looked, and walked, and looked, and felt… I don’t know, tragic. It was so difficult to picture the two awesome towers that had stood there when I had last been here in New York.
There was a sense of loss within me that was as profound as those when I lost my grandparents and my mother, an uncle and numerous friends in years gone by, some of whom had died in my presence. But there was something different here, something really terrible and unearthly, like I was coming home to a mountain that had become a valley in my absence, all its residents gone, dead.

Dead.

Murdered in the name of God. Someone else’s god, a god of destruction and murder, not the God I believe in. Not my God, not the God I worship as a Jew, not the God worshipped by Christians. I knew some people who worked there, friends who on the 11th of September, 2001, ceased to exist. In the name of Allah, the Muslim god, the god presiding over the so-called Religion of Peace.

Sure, I had been through the same uncomprehending to shocked to sad to angry succession most Americans had undergone on that morning in September, 2001, but it had been an emotional reaction from 3,000 miles away, the outrage viewed on television.

Here I was, standing on very familiar ground that had been the site of commodity exchanges I had been to often in the course of a former line of work, the offices occupied by friends and acquaintances, now gazing at an alien landscape that was in reality a kind of graveyard peopled by both innocent human beings and heroes who had attempted to save them and died en masse in the process.

I felt numb when I finally walked away, then, walking aimlessly along Trinity Place, I felt a rage building up inside me and I murmured thanks to President George W. Bush for being the American leader he is and mobilizing the wrathful might of our military in a war on the terrorist scum who had done this to us, overthrowing two dictatorships that had owned some of the responsibility for the mass murder in New York and elsewhere, either by harboring, helping finance, providing training facilities for or by sponsorship of other preparations for what those bastards did to us.

Payback for the grief those godless sons of bitches caused thousands of American families but at least equally as important, the self defense of America in an all-out war declared upon us and all western nations by a satanic enemy purporting to represent all of Islam.

Our President initiated a global war on terror and was followed into the breach by numerous other leaders who realized that we are, indeed, at war, not by our choice but by the declaration of war by the worst enemy we have faced in the entire histories of the United States and the western world.

He was opposed by nations whose reticence was dictated by profit concerns as they violated UN sanctions they themselves had signed off on, by the UN itself as the organization’s very leadership was making money off corrupt transactions with Saddam Hussein. He was opposed by American traitors whose opposition stemmed from pure internal partisan politics or from political leanings that by their ultimate nature are against the principals that have made America the world leader we are.

To this day he is villified by those same treasonous entities, but George Bush is willing to weather the abuse in order to carry on a mission whose success will guarantee the perpetuity of those same dissenters’ right to criticize their own government, those assholes like Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, San Francisco and Berkeley socialists and others who would see the United States of America destroyed if they had their way. As far as I’m concerned, those anti-American, pro-Islamofascist, liberal traitors can leave this great country and move to France, Canada or some other country that embraces their socialist needs.

For me, Ground Zero represents every reason why we need to decimate every last vestige of fundamentalist Islam on earth, by any means necessary, and those who endeavor to obstruct our doing so can go to fucking hell.