10 years later

Ten years ago, my world was turned upside down.

September 11, 2001 was the Pearl Harbor for my generation. A generation that had grown up never knowing a real war. Oh sure, we'd seen pictures of Desert Storm, but that was just a minor thing, and far away. The Cold War was something that old people still cared about. I was six years old when the Berlin Wall came down. These things didn't affect us, unless you knew someone who was personally involved. To us, wars were things that were talked about in history books, or played out on movie screens, or experienced through video games.

On that fateful September morning, however, we found ourselves faced with the same situation that had faced Americans almost sixty years before, a horrific attack on our homeland. None of us were prepared for such a thing. How could we be?

In the days that followed, I had high hopes for our country. For the entire decade before, all I'd seen in American politics was just a steady trend towards ever more bitter partisan bickering. The two parties playing dueling filibusters, the government shutting down, the Republicans impeaching Clinton because he got frisky with an intern, and the Democrats showing every sign that they would do the same thing if they got power. All the while, the tone kept getting steadily worse. The idea of a respectful compromise became anathema, as faith and politics became intertwined. The party that wanted to keep the Government out of business wanted to regulate what a woman could do with their body, or whether two people who happened to have the same gender could have the same rights as a man and a woman. The party that wanted to expand freedoms and safety nets for the poor and the elderly fought to protect people who broke the law every day, simply by being here. And neither side would back down.

In the days after September 11th, I found myself hopeful that this horrible attack would serve as a wake-up call to politicians, and the people in general, that we shouldn't be fighting amongst ourselves like this. That, even in some of our darkest days, when there were deep divisions between the parties, people could still remain civil to one another. I had high hopes.

Those hopes were crushed, slowly and systematically, as the recriminations began within weeks, and people began to use 9/11 as a club to beat down all opposition. It died when Rudy Giuliani ran for president on a campaign based on how many times he could say 9/11 in a given sentence. And its grave was plowed over when the Democrats managed to get majorities in both houses of Congress, and proved that they were no better than the Republicans. And now things are so bad that I find myself nostalgic for the relative civility of the impeachment debacle and the government shutdown of the 1990s.

I had hope. Now I have the sickening realization that it will take something radical to break the cycle of partisan bickering that has put a stranglehold on our country. I no longer believe this is a problem that can be solved the way our current system works, where it is an all or nothing, and compromise is the equivalent of toxic waste.

I am forced to one simple, horrible conclusion. Without radical changes, our country is doomed to a slow death. What form must those changes take? There are many ways it could work, but, in my view, the best would be to rewrite Article I of the Constitution completely. Throw Congress out, literally, and change it to being a Parliamentary system, where third parties will have a chance to flourish, and everyone won't be stuck in the horrible zero sum game that has crippled us for the last twenty years. Every other major democracy in the world has this system, and it works well for them. There may be ideological differences in England, or Israel, or even Russia, but you don't see the government threatening to come to a halt every few weeks like you do here.

Without major changes, I think we will all be hoping the world ends in 2012.