On 9/11

So, I've seen a lot of mixed views on 9/11 these days. Some people do the whole American civil religion "expect the flag" stuff, showing blind support of patriotism and nationalism, while others discuss the longer term impacts. I'll be doing the latter here.

The event itself was horrifying. I wasn't aware of it until school got out like 6 hours after the fact (teachers didn't tell us) and it was shocking. Everyone was panicked, and then we wanted revenge.

We invaded countries. We created a surveillance state. We gave away our rights and civil liberties to make us safer. We got thousands of our own soldiers killed, and killed tens of thousands of civilians in the process. Terrorism still exists, and new terrorists replaced the old. Bin Laden is dead, but now we got ISIS and the cycle continues.

It seems to me that the "terrorists" won. I'm not talking about al Qaeda here. We kicked their butts bad and left Bin Laden at the bottom of an ocean. I'm talking about Bush's straw man of them. The terrorists that hate our freedom and want to tyranize us. We did it to ourselves. 9/11 changed us, and not for the better. And our legacy of dealing with the event is way worse than the event itself. Terrorism, the act of inflicting terror into people and causing them to change their behavior, has been extremely effective.

I'm not saying this to bash America. But as they say in 12 step programs, the first step to fixing a problem is admitting there is one. We did not handle 9/11 well. We have left a suspension of rights, liberties, and see destruction in its wake. We got our revenge, but it's kind of like the revenge you see an action movie hero get after a multi million dollar car chase through a busy city. Yes, you killed the bad guy, but at what cost? The war on terror has been a huge pyrrhic victory. We "won", but we lost in other ways by doing so.

If I had to address the people on 9/12 15 years ago, I'd tell them they are justified in being angry, but to be careful what they do with it. Don't just do things without thinking them through first. Don't really behind the flag and give up your civil liberties in the name of security and invade countries without proper evidence and planning to do so to get revenge. Cool heads really do prevail over passion in the heat of the moment.

I do believe we can be safe while having civil liberties. And I do think we can get revenge for attacks against us without destabilizing continents.