14 years ago today the towers fell, I was just out of high school, my mom woke me up saying "I don't know if you care, but someone bombed the World Trade Center" I responded with "What, again?" and she said it is worse this time.
I got up and went to the TV just in time to see the second tower come down.
I wasn't terribly aware back then, outside of the vaguely anti-establishment ideology that most teens pick up at some point but even I knew it was kind of a big deal, and not just for the 2,996 people who lost their lives that day, it quite literally changed everything, and in virtually no that was positive.
We went to war, against a country that literally had nothing to do with it and created an ongoing tragedy that has cost innumerably more lives, on all sides, than the original attacks, we signed over our rights to privacy and due process in the name of national security, and began widespread official use of torture for the same reason, it was an entire nation lashing out blindly, and it was likely the most successful terrorist attack by anyone in history given the damage done and lives lost, and we proved exactly how closely we hold to our convictions.
We should be ashamed of our leaders, and ourselves for supporting what they did next, less than two months later the PATRIOT act was passed, the NSA was given massively expanded powers, and the Department of Homeland Security was formed. We set up sites like Guantanamo Bay on foreign soil to avoid inconvenient things like due process or access to lawyers, and indiscriminately damaged people's lives by detaining them there indefinitely.
We tortured people.
We took the vast trust and sympathy the nations of the world gave us after the attacks, and then squandered it by taking a coalition of our allies into the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, ruining infrastructure, losing troops in actually pretty massive amounts, and of course killing or displacing millions of civilians.
Here we are today and I don't feel like we have learned a damn thing, Obama, who in most other fields has done a good job I think, renewed much of the PATRIOT act a couple times, and those provisions that expired were given new life in a separate bill a little bit later, Guantanamo is still open. Torture is illegal again so that's a plus, though if anyone honestly believes the CIA or NSA when they say they totally aren't waterboarding anybody is more naive than I am, but at least they aren't supposed to do it anymore.
You could say that about anything I guess, the NSA doing bulk collection of phone records? Probably happened before they were officially allowed to, illegal wiretapping? We know that has been going on since the dawn of the technology, kidnapping people and moving them to black sites for the rest of their lives on the flimsiest pretense? Not particularly new either, the problem is that now we have asked them to do it, before it was illegal, we could be outraged when we heard about that stuff. But we have effectively walked up to a mugger and said "Here is my wallet, now punch me in the face." and he said "Okay!" He was a mugger, he was totally gonna do it anyway, but we just made it legal for him to do so, he doesn't even have to hide it that much.
Now there was and is a growing backlash against the overreaches we allowed our government to have, but it is not the mainstream and may never be, I have no confidence they will give up the powers they gave themselves, and judging by our current crop of presidential candidates, the issue won't even be brought up anytime soon. Every person in the Republican field is a hateful bigot, from JEB to Trump to Carson to Jindal, each and every one of them speaks about small government while pushing for more of the exact things small government advocates should be speaking against, like supporting the surveillance state, going to war with Iran, or permitting the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques.
But on this matter, the other side isn't that much better, Hillary Clinton voted for the war, and voted to renew the PATRIOT act in 2006, I don't see her pushing to take it away once she has those powers at her disposal again. Biden has done the same thing.
Bernie Sanders is the only serious candidate that outright opposes this stuff, but he is unlikely at best to win the presidency, I want us to do better.
The thing about being the good guys, which we all want to think of ourselves as, is that we can't do what the bad guys want, and we can't do what they do, that is why they are bad guys, it doesn't matter if it is harder to do it the right way, it is called the right way for a reason. Torturing people doesn't help, it has never helped get good information and inspiring fear, the only other use of torture, is not what the good guys should do. Restricting the liberties that we claim our enemies hate is doing their work for them, spying on our own citizens, restricting their movement, we do what they want without them having to lift a finger, that isn't being a good guy, it doesn't matter how many suspected terrorists we catch, we have principles that are more important than these people, that shouldn't be broken on behalf of someone so cowardly as to attack civilians in a time of peace. What makes them so important that we sacrifice the things that make us great for them? They don't deserve it.
They say idealism doesn't get things done, but it founded the country.
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