Square one

As anyone over the age of 30 knows and remembers, it was twenty years ago today that not only did Sgt. Pepper teach the band to play, but a infamous band of homicidal religious fanatics flew jetliners into both towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, not achieving their goal of hitting the Capitol or White House only because of brave, quick-thinking, and doomed passengers aboard Flight 93.

Yet all that seems a history lesson lost on our policy makers who botched the final military campaign of the War on Terror undertaken by President George W. Bush and followed through – if reluctantly – by Presidents Obama and Trump. Joe Biden wanted our troops home from Afghanistan and he got them – never mind the fluctuating number of American and allied civilians remaining in-country, desperately seeking a way out.

It was intended to be perfect theatre: leaving a ostensibly free Afghanistan on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with a government and army equipped and ready to stave off the Taliban menace without our assistance, sort of like the baby birds pushed out of the nest to fly free and live on their own – instead, the neighborhood predators got them.

As one who lived through 9/11, it’s somewhat ironic that the world we feared at the time has now come true by our own hand. For months we lived in mortal fear of a terrorist attack and our government took advantage of that to pass several heavy-handed restrictions, particularly on our freedom of movement and our privacy, still in place today. Indeed, we are safer from that terrorist threat, but at what cost?

Maybe this sensitivity is why I so clearly see the parallels between our reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack and the more recent CCP virus terrorist attack. In both cases, the federal government expanded in both size and reach, with our latter-day equivalent to the PATRIOT Act perhaps being the vaccination mandates Joe Biden wants to send our way. (He will have much stiffer opposition from the states on this one than George W. Bush got for the PATRIOT Act, though.)

Yet there is one clear difference between 9/11 and the Wuhan flu, and that’s our lack of being united in the immediate aftermath. Our post-9/11 Era of Good Feelings only lasted a few weeks, but that’s one thing we remember about that time. Unfortunately, we never had that same feeling after we learned we had been exposed to the CCP virus – instead, each side has blamed the other for failures in stopping the spread and treating this deadly virus. Right now the role of Muslims post-9/11 is being played by those who have chosen not to be vaccinated for whatever reason. They have become the modern-day scapegoats.

Because there’s no particular day that can be pinned for the virus breaking loose from the Wuhan lab and eventually making its way to our shores, we won’t have the chance to pick an anniversary to commemorate. Unfortunately, it ended up that we couldn’t wipe out radical Islam in 20 years and it’s looking more and more like that chunk of time won’t be any more effective than 15 days to stop the spread.