20 Years After 9/11

It's been 20 years since 9/11 changed the world as we know it. In a lot of ways, I feel like this post is probably about as interesting as my mom telling me about where she was when JFK got shot. Or maybe where she was when she found out. That was so interesting to me that I can't remember what she told me. Though I obviously remember that it was important to her. To me, 9/11 wasn't as emotionally impactful as the Challenger blowing up. That's mostly a confession about the shallowness of my priorities as a human being. I'm not proud of this. I recognize that it's a serious flaw in my character, I'm trying to overcome it. A handful of people (including a teacher!) died trying to get into space when I was in junior high. Thousands of people died when terrorists stole planes and changed history by flying them into skyscrapers that symbolized capitalism. I was working in Boulder, CO at the time. I'm almost positive that I lived up the mountain in Nederland. And that I'd taken the bus into work that morning, which is why I hadn't heard any of the news. Someone had brought in an old-school (even for the time) portable TV. It was a clunky CRT thing, with rabbit ears for its antenna. The footage of the planes flying into the buildings was playing over and over. I don't think either had collapsed yet. I'd spent the past few years getting disenchanted with the American government. I'd dropped out of college to join the military for Desert Storm. Back then, everyone I knew was afraid that the goverment would have to bring back the draft (most of our teachers remembered it going away when they were young, and they warned that it was just a matter of time before some serious military conflict brought it back). So volunteering for the Navy seemed like a wiser choice (and chance to be lazier) than being forced to join the Army or Marines. Plus, I liked the Navy recruiters better (ah, the stupidity of youth). After I got out, I came to the conclusion that Desert Storm was a huge mistake. This was a shock to me. I grew up believing that I could trust the U.S. government to mostly do the right thing. Despite growing up in a family that identified as mostly Native American. Both my grandfathers fought in WW2, because it was the right thing to do. My dad volunteered to fight in 'Nam, as soon as he was old enough. I grew up hearing about how disappointed he was that he wasn't allowed to join that fight due to hearing problems. I trusted that the government wouldn't have taken us to war in Vietnam if it wasn't the right thing to do. Just like we wouldn't have gone to war against Kuwait if it hadn't been right. After all, Americans are the good guys! We saved the world from Fascism in WW2. Right? Well, no, but that's a story for a different day. I hated the point of my existence while I was on the submarine. Our entire purpose in life was to threaten to be suicide bombers on an inconceivable scale. We were the world's biggest terrorists. We might have had an arsenal of ICBMs that we could launch and wipe out every major city in China. Or Russia. Or anywhere else in the world that had cities to melt down to radioactive glass. It's also possible that we didn't. I never had a "need to know," so I was never sure whether our missiles were the real thing or not. Whether they were or not, we all lived with the grim reality that Russia (at the very least) would be able to respond quickly enough to vaporize a cubic mile of ocean around us. We played a lot of war games when we'd pretend to sneak up to launch depth (with a squadron of enemy ships hunting all around us), launch our missiles, and then sink slowly back away so we could sneak back up a few hours later and launch a few more. But we all knew that we wouldn't survive after that first launch. I don't know about anyone else on the sub, but I know that I didn't want to. I couldn't have lived with the fact that I'd just helped wipe out a dozen or so cities. After I got out, I managed to get enough space to actually examine the truth. And I came to the conclusion that my fundamental assumptions were wrong. America had not been the "good guy" there. We weren't the "good guy" in Vietnam. We hadn't been the "good guy" in Korea. Or, really, in any of the other military actions since WW2. It's quite possible that we weren't even the good guys in WW2. Maybe the real reason we got involved at all was because the Soviets were about to conquer the world, and FDR wanted to present the American Way of Life as a better alternative. At best, we showed up to help straighten up the mess we made by getting involved in WW1. And there just is not any excuse for our involvement in that one. It turns out that the US government has almost never been the "good guy." So: I was really not a big fan of the US government when 9/11 happened. To be honest, I wasn't a huge fan of NYC either. There's a lot of other emotional baggage there, and this post is already long enough. When I saw those planes fly into that tower, my reaction was "Well, there goes what's left of our freedom." At the time, people pretended that the terrorists attacked us because the hated our freedom (that wasn't it: they attacked us because we refuse to stop meddling in the Middle East, because we're addicted to their oil). And they got belligerently patriotic and flew big American flags all over the place and insisted that we couldn't let the terrorists win. Then they threw out a huge chunk of the freedoms that the terrorists supposedly attacked us to eliminate. When I was a kid, you could just wander through an airport. Hang out at a terminal and watch planes arrive and leave. I'm glad they decided you can't just smoke everywhere and got rid of the ash trays, but I'm sad that we've gone so over-the-top about pointless security measures. I'd love to be able to walk Laura to her gate and kiss her "good-bye" the next time she boards a plane without me. When I was in school, teachers would call roll and make a list of the missing students. Then they'd hang that list outside their door. Now, there are biometric scanners to track who is in each classroom. And kids are fine with this! It's like they've been brainwashed to believe that it's fine for Big Brother to track their every movement. And then there's the surveillance state. When I was growing up, parents would scare their kids by telling us how the government in the Soviet Union monitored every facet of their citizens' lives. They didn't have the technology to manage the kind of surveillance that we regularly expect from our government. And that doesn't hold a candle to what we voluntarily share about our lives for the convenience of the little personal spies we carry around in our pockets. At least Apple and Google can't murder us with impunity just because they don't like our opinions. And, so far, the federal government hasn't taken that step (though things started getting close with the way Trump handled some of the Black Lives Matter protests). On the other hand, Congress did decide to allow the President to do pretty much anything he wanted to try to get revenge against the people who were behind the attacks. And we've committed a lot of atrocities since then. 9/11 was an unspeakable tragedy. Our response in the Middle East was much, much worse. Americans should be better than we are.