The most eloquent requiem for a country ever
This newsletter is going to hit your inbox on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, which means you’re no doubt being flooded with remembrances and retrospectives.
And regrets. The country’s response to the worst terror attack in our history was to launch a global war of hysteria that consisted of rage-bombing two countries, destabilizing an entire region, and seeding a police state that has now been fully weaponized by an authoritarian regime against its own citizens. Moreover, every post-9/11 mistake we’ve made has been understood as a mistake in real time—not by all, or even most, people in this country, but by enough that nobody can credibly claim to have been unaware of the dangers.
But the majority of Americans were always going to want to respond to violence with more, overwhelming violence. The majority of people were always going to be willing to trade a little bit of liberty (especially liberty of people perceived as Other) for a little bit of (false) security.
On 9/11, I always think about what might have been. What if, instead of making war on countries that didn’t attack us, we had made the lives of the people living in those places better? What if we had raised their standard of living, instead of bombing their standard of living? What if President George W. Bush had committed our country to using renewable energy instead of starting a war for oil? What if New York City had built Freedom Apartment Buildings instead of the Freedom Tower?
9/11 was a tragedy, but it was also an opportunity to show the world what we really valued and cared about. I guess… we did.
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