tragedy

the kids who read to the president that day at emma e. booker elementary are now in their twenties, a new generation of young adults who grew up children of forever wars, who came of age during the global war on terror, who witnessed their country slide into a surveillance state as social media replaced playgrounds and emotion-filled pr became reality—as facts, to our dismay, crumbled inside the profit factories of fear and fantasy. what should have been a targeted law enforcement operation against the 9/11 perpetrators quickly became a carefully-orchestrated pretext for our leaders to dramatically alter the constitutional foundations of our republic, to thrust the united states into a blitzkrieg season of righteous vengeance, to transform america into a martial state that would go astray by the violent blowback of its own imperial goose chase abroad—by the patriotic crusade of hunting down an abstract forever enemy called terror. as president bush, his advisors, and the fawning media corps, despite fervent opposition, drummed up support for wars in countries largely uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks, the american people never had a chance to pause and consider what might have driven a group of suicidal assassins to carry out mass murder on american soil. because "they hate our freedoms," we were told, as opposed to the list of grievances loudly voiced by al-qaeda against u.s. policy in the years leading up to and after 9/11—motives that in no way justified the attacks, but in many ways told us whom and what we were fighting. in the scramble to sell us wars of aggression, our leaders doubled down and told us that iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that we had to stop the risk of a mushroom cloud, that the region was pleading for democracy, that saddham was somehow involved in 9/11. and yet these bully pulpit lies led the united states of america, in the name of honest and hardworking everyday americans, directly into al-qaeda's trap—directly into the pandora's box of lost innocence, of military quagmire, of costly and unwinnable wars in iraq, afghanistan, and elsewhere, leaving behind a trail of death, destruction, and instability, draining trillions of taxpayer dollars into the pockets of defense contractors and corruption, and inevitably giving rise to a new generation of radicalized victims who now live their days mourning and imploring justice for the deaths of their children, their families, and their friends—many of them killed not by repressive leaders or governments at home, but by a western democracy abroad. of course i knew something had to be done. 9/11 was a crime against humanity, an unimaginably heinous act of terrorism that demanded justice. nearly three-thousand innocent people were killed that day. but i always thought we elected leaders to act responsibly, to honor the constitution, to keep calm and carry on, to avoid the temptations of bloodlust and vengeance that were fueled and gaslighted through the passions and trust of a traumatized republic. the u.s. response, over the next twenty years, would go on to exact justice on al-qaeda and many of its leaders and affiliates, but it would also kill a million people, many of them innocent, many of them who, like americans killed on 9/11, also wanted a shot at life and liberty. i learned from history that policies have consequences, that a strong defense is imperative to our domestic tranquility, that there is much good we can do with our might around the world, but for all the jingoistic bravado and kumbaya talk of freedom, security, and patriotism, as long as we keep feeding a war machine with manufactured and imagined dragons, we are not only mourning the victims and heroes of that day in vein, we are asking for more war, for more 9/11s, for more senseless tragedy