Ironically, I think Donald was right. Not now. He was right prior to the current election cycle. The terrorist did win on 911 and for a decade and a half since their action triggered the stagnation of the US: politically, economically, and culturally.
What was brilliant is they made us do this damage to ourselves. They stoked our fears and sucked us into a war with our own ally. Saddam was part of our post WWII stabilization solution for the Middle-East. The terrorist got us to dismantle the very thing that kept the terrorists in check and their ranks from swelling.
Be honest. We were complete idiots then. Be more honest we are complete idiots now. We didn’t think. We reacted. Today we continue to double down on fear and what the Terrorist would want us to do. Unlike our grandparents of the great wars, we are acting like self-absorbed, over-privileged, and snot-nosed kids. Our grandparent’s sacrifice made us that way – we have no idea what it means to be in a world at war.
I believe Trump’s wall would work much like cutting a board with a hammer; it is an idiotic approach given the available choices. What would work better is to pull our drones out of the 18 countries we have not declared war with and stop dismantling the post WII solution prior to us coming up with an alternative. Iraq, Syria, and Libya wouldn’t have happened without our post 911 posture.
Also we need to realize it is a Democratic President that is sending the drones to assassinate via Play Station. Even five years ago this would seem alarming. We are so far down the rabbit hole of fear that even our most “liberal” voices, such as the first black American President, are today farther right than W. Bush was prior to 911. We are doubling down on the 911 terrorist bidding, because we are too afraid to be honest with ourselves about how juvenile we have become and deal with our emotions.
We need to be smarter and read and understand the Milgram study. Just because the people we are killing directly or indirectly are in the next room, doesn’t make the emotional impact to their relations less, and yes, they might jump over the cubical wall and take the war to us. We need to take this less personally, act like adults, and focus on what we have power to change – our thoughts, actions, and feeling rather than their thoughts, actions, and feelings. They are doing what our founding father’s did when faced with a larger more organized force but in a global, more connected world. They are being rational. We can manage that by managing ourselves. Getting emotional and reactionary solves nothing.
We also need to stop blaming Bush and Reagan. We are adults and need to grow up and stop blaming our parent and grandparents for our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is our choice to continue the post-911 behavior, no one else’s. We need to stop throwing gas on the fire prior to building Trump’s fire-wall around the country.
Most and foremost we need to be honest with ourselves about our part and what we can really do. Reacting either through guilt or fear will block our clarity and have us focus on the behavior, thoughts, and feelings of other, which we can only indirectly effect. It is an illusion that the US is an all seeing, all knowing, all powerful force. Our persona is more like a teenager, too big for its britches with only a couple hundred years under our nation’s belt.
We would do much better putting the big boy pants on and being honest with ourselves about our role in the state of the Middle East. This means not beating ourselves up, but dealing with the facts and situation in a non-reactionary way.
There is no conspiracy, or at least not a conscious one. Instead, someone kicked a snow ball down the hill and now, a decade and a half later, it is pretty big. No one is “conspiring” to make it big. That is how life works. It is called cause and effect. It is the scientific underpinning of “karma.” The way you stop karma is to take the hit. We need to step in front of the snowball and manage the situation. Yes it will hurt, but it is inconsequential compared to the great war and what they were dealing with. We are over reacting. Still. Fifteen years later.
That is, if you step back and look at death as a whole, the vast majority of us will die from cancer or heart, lung, or kidney failure. I honestly believe our greatest immediate enemy is not Donald, Donald’s fear but rather the McDonald’s hamburger. Within a few weeks of 911 the same number of people died just in New York from these ailments, most of which are attributed to our lifestyle choices such as eating or smoking. And this mass-death is happening over and over again every few weeks. If we spent trillions there, we would be much better for it instead of where we are. If we took personal responsibility for ourselves rather than looking at others, we would do even better without spending a dime. We are being childish.
We need to learn to be less reactionary, take responsibility for our place in the whole picture, and stop acting like little children and pointing the finger at others and things we cannot control.
We need to grow the f*ck up and learn a lesson from our grandparents who actually had a real war to content with where millions upon millions died and their own homes and cities were destroyed. Which is actually close to what our enemy is facing. We have to realize, as much as it is hard to do, handfuls of us would do similar desperate things if we were in their shoes. This is not hard to understand.
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