Last week, as we were approaching September 11 in the midst of almost 200,000 official deaths from COVID (and the western U.S. was on fire, and we were all living with our increasingly fascist, racist police state), I knew it would be hard to stomach the coming day used to memorialize almost 3,000 dead because three airplanes were used as weapons 19 years ago.
When we now know for sure that Mafia Mulligan's admitted actions, inactions, and policy choices have led directly to tens of thousands, probably over a hundred thousand, of those deaths — which currently amount to more than two September 11s a week — it's hard to listen to him or people from the Right use that day and those people's deaths to further instill fear for their ends.
David M. Perry @Lollardfish said it best on Twitter:
People who compare our unity after 9/11 to our division today are correct. America was shockingly unified after 9/11. That unity was turned by our leaders into war, surveillance, deportations, concentration camps, and torture.
After 9/11, Democrats and Republicans came together to pass the Patriot Act. To create the Department of Homeland Security. To invade Iraq. We were unified. We were then exploited by our leaders.
I've pitched this essay a few times over the years during the Trump Admin, when it's been obvious how the security state constructed after 9/11 is being used by an authoritarian to push us towards dictatorship, but with no luck. But lefties like me SAID this would happen then.
And were vilified for it. But also we were right, and the unity after 9/11 was a terrible thing for our nation.
Spencer Ackerman had this to say:
When New Yorkers’ pain can be mobilized for vengeance, it matters. When there’s no one to kill in its name, it doesn’t. We learned that definitively this year.
When a person named Adam Faze commented on deaths from the pandemic like this,
there is such a lack of humanity left in this pandemic. i've lost two people to covid and the FIRST question I'm asked is "but what else did they have?" as if that makes their loss less meaningful. what they HAD wasn't KILLING them which is why they were still HERE.
A guy I know named Mike Sonn responded like this,
Imagine if we did this to 9/11 victims. "Sorry they were in the towers and died but they probably had something else, huh? I mean, are you sure the building falling on them was the real cause of their death?"
A thread by University of Pennsylvania prof Ebony Elizabeth Thomas had more of the approach to the anniversary I would like to see:
19 years ago, right now, I was heading to work. I’d been back home from the UK 1 month. I’d been teaching for a week - third year teacher... I was 24. And the sky was blue that morning in Detroit... not a single cloud.
I was a teacher that morning. But so were several friends in NYC and my bestie in DC whose dad worked at the Pentagon....
9/11/2001 was pretty much still late 1990s tech. We did not have smartphones — in fact, most of us did not have cell phones at all. My floor found out because the custodians had a TV in the closet. They were watching the morning news. Saw it. By 8:55 am, we all had our TVs on....
We couldn’t get through to our friends in NYC or DC.... Third hour we were pretty sure we were at war. I said I was worried about the President. My least favorite coworker said that our military should turn whatever country did it into a sheet of glass....
At home I checked in with my [Harry] Potter fandom friends all over the world. The New Yorkers were safe. Some people had more info. We pieced together what we knew in what was a social Web community years before social media.
I didn’t have a TV in my apartment’s bedroom. After I knew bestie’s dad was OK, I made up the living room futon, put on CNN, and... slept out there for the rest of the year. But I did not sleep that night.
I will never forget what happened. I will never forget our response. You want me to be upset over the 2016 election when November 2000 got us here. No, Gore wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. But so many have rehabbed 43 & the neocons. Which is why I can’t stand it here [on Twitter].
I envy our alternate selves who woke up on that morning 10 months before 9/11 to a different outcome. One without hanging chads OR the past 19 years. I am jealous that in that alternative universe, 45 is the host of a show I never watch, not POTUS... and the 11th of September is just another day.
That alternate universe Ebony talks about: it's a place without a Department of Homeland Security (or ICE, or CBP). Remember when that name, "Homeland Security," was proposed by the Bush administration? 2001 me couldn't believe its Nazi echoes. And then they said they wanted the first secretary of the department, Tom Ridge, to make all of us women think, My Babies Are Safe! when we saw him. You almost couldn't make it up.
And here we are, where things like that happen every day, or several times a day. You can't even keep up.
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A late addition from Frank Conniff (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame):
September 12 is a solemn date for Republicans. It marks the anniversary of the day in 2001 when they began exploiting what happened on September 11 for their own personal and political gain.
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