Public tragedies are heartrending events that gain widespread public attention. But where once prominent tragedies often brought Americans together, such tragedies no longer unify the country.
I’m not giving them this W, Bin Laden is the most influential single actor here, there were many more who laid the ground work(the John Birch society, the federalist society, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Luther Pierce, Roger Stone, Murdoch, Limbaugh, and the Koch’s come to mind) but 9/11 was the poison pill that broke the country
It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.
Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.
We united and circled the wagons, everyone that wasn’t with America was against America, that’s what 9/11 did, it gave a spark to an already existing powder keg of latent fascism in the subconscious of America. It destroyed a sense of invincibility that had been growing inside our collective culture, that the struggles were behind us and we’d always be safe, the fear and sense of uncertainty it brought thoroughly cooked the brains of so many Americans that we started distrusting everything and backing into isolation.
Bin Laden won because his goal was to make America bleed, to prove it was vulnerable to its own people, which would and has lead to the place we now stand
I’m not giving them this W, Bin Laden is the most influential single actor here, there were many more who laid the ground work(the John Birch society, the federalist society, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Luther Pierce, Roger Stone, Murdoch, Limbaugh, and the Koch’s come to mind) but 9/11 was the poison pill that broke the country
It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.
Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.
We united and circled the wagons, everyone that wasn’t with America was against America, that’s what 9/11 did, it gave a spark to an already existing powder keg of latent fascism in the subconscious of America. It destroyed a sense of invincibility that had been growing inside our collective culture, that the struggles were behind us and we’d always be safe, the fear and sense of uncertainty it brought thoroughly cooked the brains of so many Americans that we started distrusting everything and backing into isolation.
Bin Laden won because his goal was to make America bleed, to prove it was vulnerable to its own people, which would and has lead to the place we now stand