On the night of September 10 2001, a Monday, I chatted with my best friend Milo on the phone. I was in Oakland, and he was in New York City. We were laughing as we exchanged memories of times we smoked weed together, and then one of us half-jokingly warned the other that we should change the subject or else the government would track us down. That’s how they caught the World Trade Center bomber, I remember saying. I vaguely recalled news stories about how a government surveillance program had picked up chatter that led to the guy who rented the truck that was used in the 1993 bombing. People don’t talk much today about this attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, because of what happened the morning after my call with Milo.
The next morning of course I woke up to the news that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. I don’t remember how exactly I heard the news (update: my mom reminded me that she’s the one who called me with the news that a plane had hit one of the towers), but I turned on the TV just a couple minutes before the second plane hit. I watched it hit, and then I watched the towers fall. I was in disbelief like everyone else who was watching the news that morning. I had never felt the particular kind of sickened shock that I felt during those hours. A cold and hollow blackness in the pit of my stomach. I have never felt it since.
In the days that immediately followed, there was a tenderness of collective grief seemingly everywhere, felt by everyone. When we went out, we saw each other. Our eyes met the eyes of neighbors and strangers, and we exchanged looks full of both shared sadness and well wishes. The looks said, this is awful, I’m with you, and I hope you’re ok. In the dark wake of 9/11, while first responders still dug through the rubble in a mostly futile search for survivors, there was also a current of warmth and love between people.
But soon I started to see something else. President Bush began to frame things in simplistic terms of good and evil, and he started to talk about vengeance. In my Bay Area bubble, or maybe just my particular bubble of friends and family, I wasn’t hearing calls for vengeance, and I wasn’t aware of how loud those calls were in other places, so Bush’s talk of evil and vengeance sounded insane to me, sociopathic. Only later did I understand the level of blood lust in other parts of the country to bomb someone, and how it hardly seemed to matter who.
This is the moment I mark for where America started to go wrong in so many ways. These were the first few steps down a slippery slope.
In the months following 9/11 there was a modicum of debate around possible actions we might take or not take. Afghanistan emerged as an obvious target, and there wasn’t a lot of debate about targeting Al Qaeda there. But then the Bush administration – particularly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld – started talking about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
This is where the first fractures seemed to start. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. No one was saying otherwise, but the fact that Iraq was so frequently on the tongues of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld made an attack on that country seem inevitable. Even in its earliest days, talk of WMDs seemed like a thin pretext to a lot of us on the left, obvious propaganda, and we were appalled as we watched the steady march towards war.
On the other side, joining and driving this march, was Fox News and its ilk. They poisoned the notion of patriotism and explicitly fed an “us against them” narrative, where “them” was not only the terrorists who attacked us but anyone who opposed the idea of invading Iraq. This is the moment when right wingers exclusively began to drape themselves in stars and stripes, when so-called patriotism became jingoism, and then nationalism. When France opposed attacking Iraq, conservatives started referring to French fries as “freedom fries.” Many of us on the left mocked them for this, but it wasn’t actually funny, and we weren’t really laughing.
A handful of Democrats raised doubts about attacking Iraq. Others merely raised practical questions about how to mitigate various risks associated with invading Iraq. Fox News explicitly referred to all of them – and anyone who supported them or shared their ambivalence, or even an interest in nuance – as traitors. This is where conservatives put forward the notion of “real Americans” and real America vs the rest of us. In the end, famously, only one Congressperson ended up voting against the resolution to attack Iraq. My representative, Barbara Lee of Oakland.
And thus, lizard brains took over the country. Our nation’s actions were ruled by the basest impulses of my fellow countrymen, and everyone who challenged the lizard impulses was called a traitor. You can draw a straight line between this and the left-right divide that exists in America today, particularly how right-wingers think about the left. But that’s an essay for another day.
In the years after 9/11, I watched my country commit horror after horror. Not just ones that dominated news cycles – Abu Ghraib and Haditha and Nisour Square – but so many other things that weren’t challenged much at all, things that were treated as costs of doing business in the name of defeating terrorism. We rounded up suspected terrorists and sympathizers and locked them away off shore, in Gitmo. Many of the Gitmo prisoners are innocent, which becomes clear if you dig into the details, but no matter. And we tortured some of them. Sometimes we enlisted questionable allies for acts we didn’t want to commit ourselves. We learned that kidnapping could be called “extraordinary rendition,” and torture can be “enhanced interrogation.” Our bombs and drone strikes have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Collateral damage. Another awful anodyne coinage to obscure horrors we don’t want to think about.
Meanwhile, the war on terror precipitated subtler horrors here in the US. We have spent $2-3 trillion on war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’ve built a massive security complex in the US. This represents untold opportunity costs, reflected in crumbling infrastructure, healthcare, education, and our utter lack of action to address climate change.
I still hardly go a month without thinking about the photo finish between Bush and Gore in Florida in 2000, wondering whether things would have turned out differently if SCOTUS had let the ballot counting go on. I wonder how much that race might have tightened as a result of the media obsessing over Gore’s apparent smugness in debates. And I still think about how Kerry’s campaign was sunk by swift boat lies, and then how Hillary’s chances were hurt by actual information warfare. All these consequential races decided by trivialities, lies, and propaganda (and five of nine SCOTUS judges appointed as a result by presidents who lost the popular vote), and I think we’re all much worse off for it. But that’s somewhat of a digression.
When I think about the last 20 years, I feel only deep sadness that sometimes drifts into despair, for all that was, and is, and all that could have been.