superslyngel said:
2) How it made a nation most of us held in high regard, transform into somthing, that we can barely recognize anymore.
Yeaaaaaaaahhh.
Canadian here and this pretty much sums it up. I was old enough to remember the boundless optimism of the '90s, before the War on Terror, quite well. I remember hearing everyone say on 9/11 "this will change the world forever" and thinking
but it doesn't have to. We in the west could have held our heads high, refused to give in to fear, treated it as a criminal act and hunted and punished the perpetrators without turning it into an endless war against an unseen enemy that would stifle all of our freedoms attacked that day - without doing, in other words,
exactly what the terrorists wanted.
But even then, as an 18-year-old, I knew that would never happen. I knew it would change. There was too much interest, both politically and economically, in seeing it change. Bush had daddy's war to finish, even though the terrorists had no connection whatsoever to Iraq, and war would drag down the economy enough to justify massive cuts to social spending and free handouts to longtime Republican allies and weapons manufacturers.
That said, I think you'll all come out of it, and better than before. After the Second World War the US was mired in fear of Communism and went on witch hunts against its own people, became the most repressive socially that it had been in decades in the '50s. Eventually, that gave way to the Civil Rights movements in the '60s. Eventually, the populace rose up against the war in Vietnam.
Stop letting a single terrorist attack destroy everything America stands for.