“What has risen from the ashes of the 9/11 attacks?”
There was much talk at the time, and since then, and again today, about how great America is, how great Americans are, and how we will move forward and become better and stronger and so on and so forth. But it is just talk. What has happened instead is something entirely different.
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But the scary part is what comes out of it, and by now you have probably guessed my point. The Tea Party and things like the Tea Party. Strongly held anti-social illogical destructive beliefs with no hope of critical self evaluation, in a large and organized part of the population. It is obvious why this happened in the Republican Party and not the Democratic Party, but people on both sides of the political aisle have contributed. Literalist, libertarian, paranoid, self-centered, easily frightened, reactionary, sub-average in intelligence, deluded in self worth and unmovable in conviction and belief despite all evidence to the contrary. The lady from Iowa, the sauntering firemen, the sheep who welcome being harassed by the TSA agents at the gate, the people who are happy to click “I agree” when confronted with a 43 page EULA that, somewhere in there, tells you the thing you just bought and paid for is not yours; A general social willingness to be told what to do, fear of not being told what to do, cynicism that we can think of what to do on our own, and utter disbelief that collective progressive action any longer has potential or meaning.
via Generation 9/11. History will be embarrassed by us. | The X Blog.
Post 9-11. The citizens of the US have lost numerous rights while they over-reacted to the events of 9-11, allowing the uber-conservative elements of the political state to pull away from us basic rights under the US Constitution, labeling it the “Patriot Act” to get it past Congress with a label that would guarantee the sheeple would vote for it. Anyone against this would be labeled a terrorist sympathizer.
The neo-cons pounced. Two expensive wars were waged. We’re both still involved in those wars after ten years.
A technician came by last April to work on a pipe-threader at my day-job. Guy is from Romania. He escaped by swimming the Danube river, in the cold, and walked to a US Embassy to apply for asylum. This was in the 1980s. He told me that now, in the US of post-911… we have fewer freedoms than he did in communist Romania in the 1970s.
Ben Franklin once said “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
After 10 years, we are as safe as we can get so PLEASE can we have our liberties back??
