the 9/11 commission report: chapter 1

i'm going to summarize the chapters of this book, because my head is exploding.

these chapter summaries won’t really be “summaries”, exactly. because i’m not going to summarize anything. so, in that sense, they won’t be summaries at all.

this is a great start, isn’t it.

i’ve been scrawling frustrated messages in the margins, so i’m actually just going to touch on those.

“They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improve a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never before encountered and had never trained to meet.” – the book

“you can’t prepare for everything.” – frustrated scrawl 1.1

my point:

we live in what Christians call a “broken world.” broken because it doesn’t work right. bad things happen. evil exists. it shouldn’t be excused, but making decisions based on the belief that you can make it go away if you do this, this and this…is crazy. human hands cannot control evil. giving up rights/liberties/freedoms, or being ok with things like “profiling” or discrimination, because you think it will lead to everyone’s safety and happiness…is crazy. read any dystopian novel. they all have a premise of a government messing everything up by trying to control what’s wrong and fix it. and, they all have a premise of people submitting to that government. submitting willingly.

i am giving the italics button a workout today.

italicize this.

you should do that, actually. read a dystopian novel. 1984. brave new world. or watch equilibrium. those are all cute, sweet little fiction versions of the 9/11 commission report.

i said it.

history has examples of people making crazy decisions because of fear. the most absurd example of course is the salem witch trials. but there are others. the japanese internment camps. the mccarthy/communist trials. there were real problems in the world that needed to be dealt with during world war 2. but not like that.

and there were real witches that had to be drowned and set on fire!

wait.

anyway.

it’s so easy to look back and think “those people were so wrong to allow that. how could they allow that?”

but it’s happening again. fear of terrorism is making people excuse things that history will show to be ludicrous* and shameful.

for more on that, read anything by glenn greenwald.

next up: chapter 2. i'm going to give the "caps lock" button a work-out.

because that's how you SHOUT ONLINE. and convey DISMAY.

the subject: how could anyone hate america?

*you're definitely going to want to click that.