In grade school I learned about regimes who rewrote history. Today for the 10th anniversary of 911 we are getting a rewrite from writers.
I swear it’s like no one remembers Clinton or what path we were taking at the end of his terms. No one remembers the bitterness on the left concerning Bush’s win in Florida. No one remembers the “illegitimacy” of his presidency and the pure rage expressed by the left.
911 happened and there was a brief moment as we all recovered from that gut shot. But 911 is not what “damaged our collective soul and seems to have released a free-ranging hysteria that has contaminated our interactions ever since.” huh?
911 happened and we needed to go to war to make certain it didn’t happen again. But 911 didn’t trigger “America’s decline” a from “country [that] was in full bloom”.
911 happened and individually we took advantage of low interest rates and a great housing market and easy credit. But 911 is not comparable to the Lehman crisis. Nor does Lehman get credit from me for changing history by having a bad business model. Sorry dudes.
The fall of Lehman Brothers has resulted in far more economic damage and greater long-run consequences than the fall of the twin towers. This is not to minimize the horror of 9/11, its tragic death toll or the costs of its aftermath, but to put them in perspective. Whether the attacks of Sept. 11 had taken place or not, the world almost certainly would have been devastated by weapons of mass destruction — not airplanes hijacked by jihadists, nor the imaginary atomic bombs and chemical weapons of Saddam Hussein, but explosive credit derivatives in the hands of the world’s bankers.
911 changed a lot of people. It changed me. Similar to Pearl Harbor, only closer to home the heart of the country, we were attacked and could no longer count on being safe. I know many, many people who keep that in mind as they go about their days or plan for their futures. I know many, many people who found a love for this country that they didn’t realize that they had. I know many others who found new excuses to hate it.
It’s odd that just like people forget how much Reagan was despised by many, people have forgotten the animosity in politics during the Clinton years. Bush didn’t start it. Obama will hopefully be the last of it, but I am not holding my breath. There is a divide in this country amongst people and what we want the US of A to look like and be.
It’s not a ditch, it’s the Grand Canyon.
There are good points on both sides.
But the right wins in general as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want a nanny state. I don’t want to take money from you to use because I know better how to use it. We are a good country and millions would rather live here than their own home countries.
The piece by Michael Lind talks about how life would be without 911 and how the Taliban would still be going along and Sadaam would still be in control. He doesn’t talk about how the women in Afghanistan would still be hidden away and without a micron of power. He doesn’t talk about the fear in Iraq about the midnight knocks on doors. 911 took us to war. Wars are fool of errors, but in general we don’t need to fear being attacked by Sadaam or madmen in Afghanistan. Our armed forces, our state department our intelligence agencies have worked hard to make that happen. We have warnings out now. Warnings about car bombs. We are concerned about emp attacks and weapons that have disappeared in Libya. But I don’t worry about terror coming out of Iraq. They’re going to make it. I don’t worry about terror coming out of Afghanistan. I’m less sure about them, but they no longer harbor big terror operations and as long as we stay strong, they never will.
The world changes over time and to many of us 911 was a wake up call. It made us realize that our complacence with the world can kill us. George Will seems to think our choice to go to war was not put there by others, but was rather a “dubious” choice made by those in power.
He calls us demoralized. More so than since the 70s
Today, for reasons having little to do with 9/11 and policy responses to it, the nation is more demoralized than at any time since the late 1970s, when, as now, feelings of impotence, vulnerability and decline were pervasive. Of all the sadness surrounding this anniversary, the most aching is the palpable and futile hope that commemoration can somehow help heal self-inflicted wounds.
I disagree. We have had our bout with Obama and giving the left way a good ol college try. It’s plain as day that it doesn’t work and I suspect that the next election will show just how many people understand that. I wish the right would see many things differently but the right does see that we need to be strong and we need to be not only independent, as a country and as individuals, but also to be a part of this world. We live in it. It gets smaller every day and it can attack whenever it wants to if we let our guard down.
Don’t forget 911, but don’t forget that we were going down divided political pathways long before the attack occurred.
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