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Our response to 9/11 was war, not freedom
I remember 9/11, but for all the wrong reasons
I remember what I was doing that morning. I didn’t much watch TV back then. I didn’t have a job. I was running a tiny IT business. I was just getting it going and starting to figure out how to pay my bills with the business. And then one day, I got this message from a friend. “What in the world are they doing to each other?”
And then I checked the news. I saw how every flight was canceled. Every plane was grounded. I saw the burning towers. I saw them collapse. I saw news anchors cry. I saw my country stop.
I tried watching something else on TV, but every channel was showing the burning, collapsing towers on repeat, over and over. That went on for weeks. It was to me, evidence of sickness. I had sympathy for the people whose lives were destroyed, but I was already wary the government and the way they responded to the attacks.
In the years that followed, I found many conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks. I have reached the conclusion that even if I take the most conventional view, our response to the attacks was pervasive and invasive coercion. To me that massive military buildups, massive increase in security an surveillance, and the huge interruption of our daily lives were not about freedom. That’s all coercion.
