A Divided Country: How the Terrorists Won

I’ve shared on the blog my experiences on September 11, 2001. I was a seventeen-year-old kid who barely knew what the World Trade Center was on his first day of college in a school where a large portion of the population were either New Yorkers or wannabes. I was out of my depth even as we all pondered how such a thing was going to change us as a nation.

I recall my college roommate said we would be more interested in non-fiction and documentary film. That has certainly been the case for me. And we wondered all these things while a President called the “reckoning” the War on Terror. Looking back amidst the recent political assassinations on both sides of the political spectrum, the terrorists won that war.

What is terrorism? What is its intended purpose? Look around you. A divided country plunging into perhaps one of the most violent times any of us have ever experienced. Protests that become riots. The murders of outspoken critics on both sides. Much like what we imagined “third world” countries were before the 21^st century landed in our first-world laps. People don’t even know their own identities anymore, latching onto any fabric cut to today’s rhetoric.

Now, no one can be on the progressive or traditionalist sides because those sides are called, pejoratively, “socialism” and “fascism.” While our current President isn’t even “Republican” if you think about it, and there well may be neo-fascists who support him for one reason rather than another, socialism (or democratic socialism) is certainly gaining ground. I’ve never seen young people more open to it.

I’ve read the Communist Manifesto and other children’s literature and undergraduate papers. That Utopia could only be dreamed about in a time where dystopic literature is at its height because artists look around the world and see it crumbling before their very eyes. But they can only dream of this if they believe the last decade has seen any kind of progress.

I don’t see progress. I see communities descending into tribal units. I see the idea of individualism being pooh-poohed by academics, and yet none of us (any side, as I am neither Democrat nor Republican) are happier. Some think they are, especially those with the red caps, but they’re not. They (and their behavior) are biproducts of what terrorism is known for: gripping the imagination and dividing a people.

If we are not a divided country, what could you call us now?