One particular part of the day.
The day the attacks happened, I thought, the one thing we must not do is let these attacks change the country for the worse. That would give enemies a far bigger victory than the attack.
The way to spite them and deny them victory was to say, “we aren’t changing a bit over this.” We stand for the same values as before. Violence won’t take that.
I wasn’t sure, but I was worried how the country might react — history has shown that right.
It was before I’d read “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein, who laid out a theory of taking advantage of such shocking events for agendas.
I think we as a nation would have been a lot better off if they’d done done as I wanted and refused to change the country.
No massive new security state, Bush continuing his decline in ratings and not re-elected, no Iraq War in the name of getting even for 9/11.
Not that day but not long after, I felt what our leaders needed to do was send a message to de-sensitize the public to lesser terror attacks — normalize them like other violence.
Fat chance.
I see parallels now.
trump is teeing up the country for a massive reaction to the next big event — which he will grab as license for his radical plans just as Bush grabbed 9/11 to attack Iraq.
And history says it’ll work. No shortage of politicians who have been unpopular and benefited greatly from armed conflict.
We’re not that good at undoing some of these things. Overreaction to 9/11. The cold war. Paranoia about Muslim terrorist attacks. The desire for unlimited military power.
I suggest we plan to fight trump’s coming power grab, hard.
And the way to do that, it seems to me, is to try to innocculate the country against terror attacks — don’t overreact.
The San Bernadino shootings were terrible — and a small fraction of the murders in the country the same day. No need to tear up the constitution and punish a billion people for them.
Let’s try to have “there was a terrorist murder of five today” and “there were five people killed in crime in a city today” get similar responses — that’s news, but don’t overreact.
Let’s take the ‘shock’ out of the ‘shock doctrine’ for their plans for the next terrorist event.
The alternative is yet another overreaction and new harms to our country and the world as the wrong people seize it for their own power and bad policies they can’t wait to enact.
The point of “The Shock Doctrine” is taking advantage of people’s shock to do things they wouldn’t usually allow.
Let’s not allow them when there is that ‘shock’. Let’s aggressively advocate for a better narrative that doesn’t reduce Muslims to “are they terrorists (yet) or not?”.
I’d like to see the country warned by leaders of the plans to take advantage of an attack — so the public is ready with a yawn and opposition to the power grab.
Right now, trump is very wounded, we have a good resistance. A big event that gives him a 9/11-type ‘country rallying behind the president’ boost could have that overnight. We don’t want that.
We can’t prevent an event, but we can lessen how much it can be exploited, but it’ll take changes beforehand to the public’s views of these things to lessen the tensions in place currently.
trump is betting his presidency on being able to do this — it’s why he keeps talking as if there have been such attacks — like his reference to Sweden recently. He’s getting away with it quite a bit.
