Looking Back to Look Ahead
The revisiting of 9/11 by Millenials and Gen Z
Recently,The Guardian removed a 20-year old post of Osama bin Laden’s Letter to America. The letter had gone viral among Millenials, Gen Z and Alpha’s, who were seeing it for the first time and experienced cognitive dissonance from the stories they were told about 9/11 in schools and the information that had been withheld from them.
Although most of the furor has died down, I wanted to give some perspective on 9/11 and bin Laden from someone who was already an adult at the time.
Just after 9/11 the government’s first response was to tell the American people: shop! The terrorists are trying to destroy the American way of life, which was true, and the best way to fight that is to create a strong economy. So we had freedom fries and all kinds of “Made in USA” competitive nonsense.
And it worked. The economy bounced back as early as January 2002. So the consumer propaganda did affect the economy, and also inspired some predatory credit card practices… that were adopted by mortgage companies… that led to the subprime lending… that, ultimately, brought about the Great Recession in 2008.
The Homeland Security Act was created in 2002, and immediately started to strip away American’s civil rights. The problem, when your rights…
