I remember the Patriot act as my first wake up call to how fucked up the future would be.

The “Homeland” shit was such a (fascist) red flag even then. Telling that there’s never been any real attempt to roll that or the “patriot” act back by either party.

Edit: also, the guy appointed as the first head of that dept, Michael Chertoff, was heavily invested in those body scanners they put in every airport.

I remember Freedom Fries. Robert Plant (from Led Zeppelin) made a great song with the same name. https://youtu.be/ky_JUp_c2OM

I was sixteen when the towers fell.

I had woken up and started getting ready for school, and my mother was out in the LDK watching the news, cause sometimes she does that before she goes to work. I remember her standing there with her head and one arm in a sweater, just staring at the TV. I couldn’t see what was on it, but she must have heard me. She looked at me and took a step to the side, and I saw the South Tower in ruins on the ground. This was shortly after seven in the morning.

I didn’t quite understand the impact of what happened, but that was New York, this was Dundee, Oregon, and I had only been in America for five years at this point—my English was improving, but a lot of the cultural bits were still getting filled in. This was a tragedy, yeah, but how often did this happen?

On the schoolbus was hushed mumbling, no rambunctiousness, conjectures whispered and conspiracies flying unchecked. No one even knew who was dead or alive, but we were glad it was just the South Tower that hit.

When I got to my first period English class, the full literary one I still struggled with, there was no teaching, no handing back my essay with a C at the top, none of the usual. There was a belted cart television, and the news was playing, same as at home.

And that’s how I found out the North Tower fell on the bus ride to school.

All day long, we shuffled mindlessly from classroom to classroom, no teaching, watching belted TVs of firefighters picking through the rubble. Scores and scores of dead were found. Kevin Cosgrove’s last call was played so many times that I still remember that he had misspelled his boss’ name as Ostaru in stead of Ostrau, a fact I had later looked up when I was older in life as that call recording continues to haunt my very existence even now, can even hear his final “oh no oh god!” in my head as the tower collapsed.

At the start of the class, kids would be called out by name to the principal’s office and this naïve Tanis thought they were in trouble, but no, every single goddamn time they would come back thoroughly emotionally befucked and sad, angry, and I remember one kid named Kyle just walked back into the classroom after being called by the principal, he just started decking the whiteboard as hard and as fast as he could until there was a bloody smear; no one made a move to stop him, not even the teacher.

I ended up finding out sometime at lunch that the other kids getting called to the principal’s office had lost family; Kyle had lost his dad.

At the end of the day, we were still watching the belted TVs, and we all collectively realized this was the end, we didn’t know what it was the end of, but we knew something was over.

Turns out, it was our freedoms.

I remember trying to warn everyone about this and being told I was helping the terrorists.

I knew this day was coming now we got ICE. Corporate Democrats will talk about how, oh, you know, this was not the intention, but honestly, who are you fooling? They use compartmentalization and a bunch of mumbo jumbo to bamboozle your ass but every step forward is a step closer to the full fascist state.

They play this game of, “oh, but you have to play it by the rules”, but they outpace the rules and you’re left behind dealing with the bureaucracy. This is corporatism, which is really just fascism, in the later stages of empire and capitalistic rot.

How are we to have free and fair elections, if money is the number one contributor to a successful political campaign. How are we to say we elected someone to act on our behalf when they are representatives and not a delegates that we can quickly deal with if they go against our will? I was right in the past and I’m reluctant to say what I think because people will want to nail me to a cross like they did before. Isn’t that kind of funny how the turd herd works, if you go against what the herd thinks, you’ll get ostracized, even though give it some time and y’all will be on the same page. Kinda.

Some people are just out of sync with reality, and if this is the direction we are headed, it is accelerationism, not by our choice, but by design that will take place and eventually we will all be on the same page. So have some patience, because we’re all going to get what’s coming to us.

What you do overseas will come back to you and me. The colonizer will be colonized.

This is the Imperial Boomerang. Yankee flavored.

I was deployed October 2nd 2001 so yea I remember, I also remember thinking the Patriot Act was absolutely the wrong call.

I’m not that old, am I? I mean, it was clear then that it was a power grab. Shameless, really, as they wrapped it all up in patriotism, duty, and honor.

I remember the sudden groupthink, and the shift in villains. The bad guy was no longer a nondescript eastern European guy, the bad guy now wore a turban.

The day-of, I just remember my teacher being out in the hallway on the phone for like 30 minutes, then an announcement was made over the intercom that parents would be picking us up. I didn’t know what happened until I got home. Then we just watched news replay the towers getting hit over and over for a few days.

A few years later, I remember being instructed on coloring in an outline of the country of Afghanistan (joke here about Americans only learn geography from war) and the teacher told us if we wanted to draw a bomb or something in the air above it, that’d be okay. Shit was absolutely fucked. I remember having a mock vote for Kerry v Bush and I was the only kid who didn’t vote Bush and the principal called my parents to collect me from school for the day.

The Department of Homeland Security was just a combination of existing federal bureaus into one entity. What you have to remember and what is noted in the 9-11 report and everyone should read the 9-11 report is that we had evidence of the attacks prior to them occurring, but the problem was inter-agency rivalries prevented the information getting to some central location where you can connect the dots.

Now it’s not to say that there wasn’t a lot of knee jerk authoritarian reaction to the attacks in the form of the patriot act, warrantless surveillance, legalized torture, and extraordinary rendition. Combining federal agencies into the department of homeland security by comparison seemed pretty mild at the time.

I remember the internet warning that Republicans would lead to the state of affairs today.