Discussion
If, like me, you were aghast at the anti-muslim, jingoistic fervor that gripped the US after 9/11 and soulsick about the consequences at home and abroad, it's entirely reasonable to remain incandescent with rage at Trump's litany of lies appropriating the deaths of innocents for his power and wealth.
Don't give liars power because you hate what the US did in rage and fear, reclaim the truth and hold it up as a lesson. Same for Jan 6th.
@patmikemid If your instinct a month afterward was retribution and not speed reading of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, then maybe it would be good to reflect on how nations are not individuals, and when they act like petulant children, it's their own futures they harm.
@patmikemid That's not "blame ourselves" -- far from it -- but we did not act in proportion to our interest. We were not smart about it. 25 years later we still don't have a handle on radicalisation or how to effectively combat it. And we opened the door to torture, national aggression, and a sprawling panopticon that is now eating our values and our neighbors. The through line is the failure to take a beat and learn.
@slightlyoff I don’t disagree with your points, in hindsight. I am saying, on a visceral level, at the time, as a person who was born and raised on the eastern seaboard of the United States, I was still very hurt and very pissed after a month. I will never agree that my feelings were misguided. Twenty five hundred people went to work that day and didn’t get to come home to their families because of this act. I’m not enough of a spiritual person to be able to overlook that.
@slightlyoff but I take you point that downstream we have fucked ourselves royally. And we’ve done it far better than the perpetrators could have ever imagined.
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@slightlyoff May I ask, how soon after 9/11 are we talking? I ask, because, until we attacked Iraq for no reason, everything seemed proportionate to me. NATO Article 5, etc. As I stood in my living room watching those planes hit the towers with my two year old running around, there was no doubt in my mind that we were going to war. Now the Patriot Act, flying the Saudis out, Iraq was all bullshit, but in the moment it was a gut punch like I’ve rarely experienced.