Your Annual 9/11 Memorial Riddle
Q: What's the difference between 9/11 and a cow?
A: The government can't milk a cow for 14 years and counting.
# NeverForget
# NeverLetThatSenseOfPanicSubside
# BeAfraid
# BeAbsolutelyTerrified
# AndStayThatWayForever
# DismantlingTheConstitutionIsTheBestWayToHonorTheDead
Last week, I recorded for later viewing several episodes of a documentary series called "The Seventies," which aired on CNN. Just last night, coincidentally, I watched the episode about the rise of terrorism in that decade -- holy hell, Americans (and Westerners in general) back then would've been justified in thinking the entire world was falling apart. There were some particularly bad weeks wherein there would be major plane hijackings every day. Not just in the US, but throughout the western world. And bombings were downright commonplace as well. As were kidnappings and assassinations of even rich and powerful people -- again, in the US and the western world. Yet we were able to get through all of that without gutting the constitution and making a fetish out of fear.
Serious question: what the hell happened, to make early 21st-century America behave so much more helplessly, cowardly and reactionarily, compared to the craphole America of the freaking 1970s? In the 70s, we'd just lost our first war (Vietnam); our economy was in the toilet (stagflation); there was an actual no-joke nationwide gasoline shortage thanks to the Arab oil embargo; the Cold War still existed so we had to live with the genuine existential fear of knowing "Our number-one enemy on the world stage has a nuclear arsenal sufficient to wipe us out in 15 minutes" -- by almost every objective measure, 1970s America was in far worse shape than the America of Sept. 10 and the early hours of Sept. 11, 2001. So why did the latter America fail so spectacularly, the first time it faced adversity? Did we really devolve that much in a single generation?
A: The government can't milk a cow for 14 years and counting.
# NeverForget
# NeverLetThatSenseOfPanicSubside
# BeAfraid
# BeAbsolutelyTerrified
# AndStayThatWayForever
# DismantlingTheConstitutionIsTheBestWayToHonorTheDead
Last week, I recorded for later viewing several episodes of a documentary series called "The Seventies," which aired on CNN. Just last night, coincidentally, I watched the episode about the rise of terrorism in that decade -- holy hell, Americans (and Westerners in general) back then would've been justified in thinking the entire world was falling apart. There were some particularly bad weeks wherein there would be major plane hijackings every day. Not just in the US, but throughout the western world. And bombings were downright commonplace as well. As were kidnappings and assassinations of even rich and powerful people -- again, in the US and the western world. Yet we were able to get through all of that without gutting the constitution and making a fetish out of fear.
Serious question: what the hell happened, to make early 21st-century America behave so much more helplessly, cowardly and reactionarily, compared to the craphole America of the freaking 1970s? In the 70s, we'd just lost our first war (Vietnam); our economy was in the toilet (stagflation); there was an actual no-joke nationwide gasoline shortage thanks to the Arab oil embargo; the Cold War still existed so we had to live with the genuine existential fear of knowing "Our number-one enemy on the world stage has a nuclear arsenal sufficient to wipe us out in 15 minutes" -- by almost every objective measure, 1970s America was in far worse shape than the America of Sept. 10 and the early hours of Sept. 11, 2001. So why did the latter America fail so spectacularly, the first time it faced adversity? Did we really devolve that much in a single generation?
posted by Jennifer Abel at 6:28 AM
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