Every year I put up a piece about the 9-11 attack on our country. I like to make sure I stoke that rage at least once a year. Complacency isn’t a good thing and every September 11th I just become enraged. This year, 12 years later, is no different.
How dare they!!
Feel free to share your thoughts. Some of our readers have some very personal stories. While I wish for healing for everyone, I also hope that each of us alive that day will serve as a living testimony to American survival and grit. The terrorist did not win. Not even close.
While I feel sad for the victims and their families, I can’t help thinking about the continuous state of anxiety we have lived in over the past 12 years, where everything (a pair of shoes, a bottle of water) is some kind of potential threat. And then there are all the ways that our leaders have used that anxiety to get buy-in on whatever new boneheaded intervention they dream up, and also to systematically strip away our freedoms, all in the name of “freedom” or “the war on terror” or whatever the buzzword is this month. Our government’s unspoken post 9/11 policy has been “keep the people scared, and they’ll agree to anything.” In that sense, yes, the terrorists did win.
I knew on 9/11/01 that our freedoms as we knew them would never be the same again.
Is verizon the only ‘channel’ that is airing the entire 9/11 tribute at the WTC memorial today?
As I surf I only see the memorial on one channel. That’s sort of sad that 9/11 has been replaced by the Young and the Restless.
Our government’s unspoken post 9/11 policy has been “keep the people scared, and they’ll agree to anything.”
Standard statist plan. Never let a crisis go to waste. Always try to get the nation “fired up” on a war footing, even during peace. Its the progressive play book.
Notice…I didn’t differentiate between parties or politicians……
Political correctness will ensure that we ALL must endure searches and interrogations rather than using common sense methods to focus on those most likely to cause us harm. We’ve forced a certain amount of loss of freedom upon our selves to just to placate society. I’m glad that local law enforcement uses common sense in trying to determine who is the most likely offender rather than rounding up all who live in the city where a crime was committed. Lets just hope that local law enforcement never gets turned over to the federal government.
The People are sick and tired of all the inconvenience and hinderance of free movement created by the counterterrorism preventive system.
My old foes used to love to hear that. They licked their lips and ate it up, waiting for the operational openings sure to follow.
Everyone is sick and tired of it. However, what would you have us do? Obviously we cannot go back to the freedoms we once had.
@Moon-howler
I agree that we can never go back. Look at the whole water-bottle thing on airplanes. It’s hard to believe that, after 12 years, there isn’t a solution that will allow air passengers aboard with their own water bottles. The technology is there for mass spectrometry to identify explosive compounds. But the restriction has been a TREMENDOUS financial boon for bottling companies and merchants of those $3 bottles, as opposed to my 20-cent Kirkland water. And why are we still taking off our shoes? No one else does that. What can you put on shoes that you can’t put in your cargo pockets, rub in your hair or use other (ahem) body parts to hide? What on earth can you hide in rubber flip-flops? I would argue that it’s all about maintaining profits, ineffective agencies and some really useless Federal jobs, and not at all to do with public safety anymore. But as long as we’re still afraid of the one-in-72-million chance of being on a hijacked plane, we’ll just keep paying with our tax dollars and our freedom.
I would prefer to pour my money into technology than into hiding the water bottles. I don’t see that as freedoms as much as common sense though.
Maybe the problem is airport training and the fact that we have so many airports.
I don’t go anywhere any more because I find flight so horribly annoying. Going through an airport is just refined torture. I don’t know who I blame for that. Ultimately, terrorists.
Good questions and well-written complaints. The problem for us is a length and scope of terrorist threat that we have never faced before. We cut off the head of the beast in Pakistan but the beast is a Hydra not easily pinned down. And the beast watches every security move we make in an effort to find the weaknesses. You are both right. We will not see 10 September 2001 again until the time when the beast is killed once and for all. And who knows when that will be? But, each time we lose tolerance for security accommodation and sacrifice and step back, the odds grow against us. Until we step back too far and become what I used to call “victims-in-waiting.”
I think the key for finding the balance of safety is to become more directly involved either as citizens or through our elected representatives. TSA and shoes and water bottles do not bother me as much as the revelations on the scope of NSA and its involvement with our private communications entities. As a one-time product user, I know how valuable a service NSA provides; but we have to be pro-active in finding a solution to what appears to be overreach in the interest of greater coverage. This NSA thing seems to be hanging around Washington even now without all branches of federal government cooperating to find a modus operandi which both provides for our safety and protects our sacred liberties as Americans.