strong piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/its-not-september-12-anymore/609502/

i will say that it's wild to me whenever i encounter the idea/people who bought fully into govt rationale behind our 9/11 response. like, i get it. i understand rally behind the flag & how the propaganda machine worked at that time & still works even more effectively today...

but i was raised to distrust the govt, especially re foreign entanglements / military-industrial complex and to always suspect that 1. we were kicking hornets nests all over the world for profit and 2. we were generally hiding our motives behind the flag so even after 9/11...

it always rang untrue to me to hear "we were attacked for our democracy" or whatever Bush tried to spin it as (though i guess maybe he had to say whatever he had to say to get the whole country behind him in an effort to fight back? idk. that's my extremely generous read)...

and then of course the argument to invade Iraq in relation to 9/11 seemed like a lie from jump. and not just because i'm predisposed to distrust U.S. motivations for invasions (though that def played a part), but really simply because of the reporting...

specifically the stuff i was reading in @NewYorker at the time, particularly the reporting of Seymour Hersh, who seemed to have a new story every week in the months leading up to the invasion that basically said all this "WMD in Iraq talk" doesn't stand up to the facts...

that was always extremely frustrating to me and why i really struggled (to put it lightly) with Hillary because I always felt like if the New Yorker knows this WMD talk is a lie, then people in the federal govt have to know even more about how it's BS...

anyway. i guess i say all of that to say 1. i appreciate my parents for instilling in me a healthy distrust of authority while at the same time teaching me to look for & believe in solid reporting & verifiable facts 2. just sort of recognizing how skewed my worldview clearly was

my parents were shaped by the counterculture movements of the vietnam war era and that in turned shaped me, and i spent most of my youth (my life really) surrounded by & surrounding myself with people who shared that worldview...

i just -- clearly wrongly -- assumed that was the prevailing attitude of people on the left. i didn't trust the govt w/ war powers and i didn't trust the police state & neither did any of my friends... but then 9/11 happened and there was buy in across the political spectrum...

and reading that Atlantic piece just reminded me that i guess a whole generation of people on the left (and probably even some on the right) had to watch the disaster in Iraq to see those lies exposed for themselves...

idk. obvs that's all sort of irrelevant at the moment and me basically just blogging on twitter again or whatever. regardless.

i def hope we do come up with something better in the post-Covid era and i'm all-in on whatever i can do to help get us there. we desperately need it.