Twenty years later.

 The attacks that happened twenty years ago are still fresh in my memory and in the memories of many other people. They remain a horrendous tragedy. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan should never have happened. It was entered into in a fit of collective rage. The way the issue of Al-Queda should have been handled was the way campaigns against unsavory people or people who are out of favor with the government have been traditionally handled. Putting money out there for the mercenaries to clean up the mess.

I was against the war in Afghanistan from the day it was declared. I had people spit on me. I had people tell me that I was a traitor. I had people tell me that I was a terrorist sympathizer. I had people tell me that I hated America. My position has always been we never should have gone to war with Afghanistan, regardless of the fact that Al-Queda was hiding in their mountains. It would be like a country declaring war on us because of the Proud Boys or the KKK are tolerated by people in our country. 

The few thousand who died this day does not justify the many more who have died over the last twenty years. Don't tell me that the dead wanted this. They wanted to just go about their day and go home to their families. The dead on both sides of the conflict were human beings with simple desires. And now they're corpses.

People accuse President Biden of 'failing' in Afghanistan when he was following up on what President Trump negotiated. The fault of the unfurling fiasco lies on the shoulders of multiple presidents. Al-Queda was trained by the United States to carry out terrorist activities against the Russian forces in Afghanistan and the immediate region. They eventually drove the Russians out. At which point they turned on the United States because they wanted autonomy. They had a taste of it after driving the Russians out of Afghanistan and they wanted more.

So, Al-Queda did what they were trained to do. They carried out a terrorist attack against a larger opponent. As for the Taliban, we should have stayed the hell away from them as well. I'm not sure if the Taliban developed under the same influences as Al-Queda. I suspect that is the case. Now that Afghanistan is back in their hands, I presume their regime will be especially punitive in an effort to force the people back into the state they were in prior to the war's beginning and the complete upheaval of that nation.

All we did was make things worse. Why? Because we were mad and decided that somebody had to pay. It's the mentality of immature people that speak with their fists, if I'm going to call a spade a spade. We punished an entire nation for the actions of a few. And established a dangerous precedent. I'm watching and waiting for that to come back on us. There's a reason I and my family don't live in a major metropolitan center known for some national significance. The closest one is barely a shadow of what it was and only film and photography nerds would be able to identify the significance of it.

And we made things worse in this country. All y'all act like Donald Trump's presidency unmasked the ugliness in this nation. No, it was the zealous behavior in the time after the terrorist attacks that did it. And that level of zealotry is encouraged, even today. I know people who practice Islam and they have to hide their practices as to remain safe. I don't practice Islam but I do wear a head covering. The Islamophobia has spread and grown such that anyone who does so is assumed to be a 'towel head' and are harassed with relative impunity. President Trump's open support of racists, white supremacists, and literal neo-Nazis only made the situation more blatant and ugly. But this attitude has always been here.

The attitude that you're not really an American unless your white, Christian, and live in the right neighborhood. Don't believe me, go ask your black neighbors. Go ask your Asian neighbors. Oh, wait, if you're white you probably don't have neighbors of different ethnicity. Self-segregation is a thing that's only gotten worse as time goes on and economic disparity due to systemic racism and religious persecution persists. What religious persecution? Oh, any religion that isn't nominally Christian.

But, that's all in the past, right? We're mourning the dead again, as we do every so many years, in a form of ritualistic masturbation to justify the horrid deeds that this nation has committed. People die every day. But we don't mourn them. We don't build monuments to them. Not even the ones who've died due to Covid-19. (Which is still a fire raging out of control but everyone wants to desperately to go back to life before Covid-19 that they're willing to sacrifice children for their 'liberty'.)

Long story short, it was a tragedy. All of it. It still is a tragedy. It was also one of the most horrific failures of the modern United States that I have ever witnessed. The other being how all y'all are handling Covid-19. I don't think the Covid-19 situation will take 20 years to resolve itself, though.