The 9/11 anniversary past almost unnoticed last weekend. Some articles here and there … it is already yesterday’s news.
The 9/11 anniversary past almost unnoticed last weekend. Some articles here and there … it is already yesterday’s news.
It affects us every day, not just on 9/11, though we haven’t forgotten the date (today, not last weekend!). Our “brilliant” color-coded airport security system (green-yellow-orange-red – what the hell does that even mean?!?) hasn’t come down from orange since 2001. (I may be the only one who grins when they announce “security alert: orange” over the loudspeakers at O’Hare.) Security checks your trunk when you want to park near the Sears Tower or Hancock building, and there are concrete blocks in the Daley center to keep you from driving your car into the building.
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What you just described sounds more like orwellian paranoia or a kafkaesk security state. And an orange security alter sounds a bit daft to me … what’s that supposed to mean? Osama on vacation? Buddhists on the rise? 
9/11 has pushed the culture of fear even further ahead, but the event itself is now ‘history’ – a still very twisted peace of history.
Buddhists on the rise! Hee!
I think our lovely Shrubbie administration just loveslovesLOOOOOOVES to play on this fear. It was pretty effective early on in his regime. Being surrounded by these security alerts has really desensitized most of us, though – especially those of us who travel extensively.
I wonder sometimes, if I have kids, what will their high-school textbooks say about 9/11 and Bush and the Iraq war – essentially the first decade of Y2K? The 50s had McCarthyism, the sixties Vietnam…
When you read 1984 you realize soon that the constant fear and hate are brilliant tools for poltical suppression. An external enemy was always the most convinient way to distract the people from internal problems and incompetence.
My fav Shrub line in that context is “They hate us for our freedoms”.
I think the end of the cold war left a gap that needed to be filled for a further 50 years to have an excuse for the military industrial complex.
Radical Islamism has been around for a while – it was only much more interesting after the Soviet Union was gone.
Anyone remember the book / slogan “The End of History”, when it was claimed we had finally reached a solid state for all mankind?
Oh boy …
No fakes and no insults please. Thanks!