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As I write this it is 10 years to the day that some religious nutters killed 3000 people a few blocks from where I am sitting. I remember the day very clearly (as does anyone who was in New York that day) but I am not going to talk about that, I've done it here before and the time has come to move on.

The only thing that makes this year any different from the last 9 is that it falls on a multiple of 5. Oh and the Iraq Body Count now stands at 111,937. That is approximately 37.31 times 9/11. Note, that is only Iraq. I didn't include the dead in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else that has been bombed to smithereens in the last decade. Iraq Body Count also only includes verifiable civilian deaths, the real number is probably a lot higher.

A lot of friends have been posting updates on Facebook along the lines of "Never Forget", I personally have no problem with that but lets stop living in the past and take a look at the present and the future.

This future is being presented to me right now outside the front door. Cops and men with machine guns behind barricades everywhere. It reminds me of my first visit to Belfast in the late 1980's except that this is no occupying force, this is our very own elected representatives doing it for "our safety".

Sure, I don't doubt that there are nutters out there who would like nothing better than to blow something up today but how is that any different from yesterday or next Tuesday. If those fuckers really want to do it they will, you can flood Downtown Manhattan with all the cops and army personnel you want and they'll probably blow something up in Pittsburgh.

Once you come to this realization then you understand that the cops and army folk all around you with their big guns are only there to provide the illusion of security. Sometimes it is an illusion that doesn't even make sense, over the course of the last week I have seen army guys with M-16 machine guns standing around inside crowded train stations. What the hell good are those guns in an enclosed and crowded space? They aren't any good, it's just an illusion.

I don't want this to come off as an anti-authoritarian post, it's not. I am well aware of the fact that many of the people who lost their lives that day were police and firemen who rushed into the building to try and save others. The cops and the firemen are not the problems here, the politicians are. Hell, the first responders aren't even invited to today's ceremony.

Bloomberg, Guilliani, Dubya, Obama and all the rest of the politicians just want their photo opportunity and a chance to cry crocodile tears. They need to do this to justify all the wars and people they have killed since that day. I hate to sound so cynical but it really bothers me and after 10 years it has the appearance of nothing but taking advantage of other people's grief.

They say the world became a more dangerous place on September 12th 2001, I call bullshit, it's no more dangerous than it was on September 10th 2001. The only thing that changed was our perception, finally our foreign policies came home to roost and we didn't like it.