Trying to imagine people going around after 9/11 saying "You know, the flu kills 60,000 a people a year so not sure what the big deal is here!" and how the people *now* making that same argument would have received it then.

We completely transformed nearly every facet of American public life and governance after 9/11 (way too much in many ways!) We entered into the longest war in US history.

We created a new cabinet agency with constantly growing budgets and permanent security bureaucracies. All driven by a political discourse driven by a reactionary rhetoric of a clash of civilizations. We spent trillions of dollars all around the principle of #NeverForget

And now some of the loudest, most vicious voices in the debate over the Global War on Terror are watching tens of thousands of Americans dying - at home, in nursing homes, in veterans homes - and saying: eh. What's the big deal?