When four U. S. airliners were skyjacked over the northeastern United States and sent into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, and a deserted field in Pennsylvania, and nearly three thousand innocent people lost their lives in the span of 102 minutes, on September 11, 2001, it seemed like, even in the midst of such unmitigated horror, death, and destruction, that the world in general was embracing America in a whole new fashion, and that Americans had found a true purpose in the 21st century.
That, sadly, did not turn out to be the case. In fact, it wasn't even close. Instead, a lot of the things that we as a nation thought we had buried, including ethnic and racial animosity, and political and generational warfare amongst ourselves, came gushing through the surface and infecting virtually everything about us. We actually came within a hair's breadth of losing our democracy on January 6th, 2021.
The PBS "Frontline" documentary AMERICA AFTER 9/11, which aired on September 7, 2021, four days before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and just shortly after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, gives us a gripping, and oftentimes stomach-turning, look back at the things that erupted out of the ashes of 9/11, including the first egregious act, an invasion of Iraq whose pretext was a cooked-up lie conceived by then-President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney that Iraq and its loathsome leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in its possession and was in league with Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda, the rogue terrorist leader and group that had actually carried out 9/11. The fact that the corporate news media bought and sold this lie hook, line, and sinker, plus a great deal of prevarications, over the succeeding decade and a half made it, if not inevitable then certainly possible, for a would-be dictator to become president of the United States-which is sadly what happened, in the personage of one Donald Trump. All the while, the cause of the mistrust, the ill-conceived Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures that consumed not only Bush, but also Barack Obama, and which led to Trump, still haunted America.
The documentary, which is both alternately fascinating and outraging in equal measures, culminates with the horror of the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to install Trump as virtually dictator-for-life after he had legitimately lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. And all the while, we as a nation not only had to deal with foreign interventions, but the explosions of racial violence stemming from the May 25, 2020 of George Floyd, and the single worst pandemic the world had seen since 1918.
What AMERICA AFTER 9/11 tells us is that the worse enemy we have to face in the 21st century is no longer some vague threat from overseas; it is within our own borders, and fueled by twenty years of mistrust in our core institutions, a mistrust far worse than anything we even saw during the Vietnam era. We need to seriously come to grips with such a reality and fix things, or the United States may not survive as the beacon of democracy for much longer.
That, sadly, did not turn out to be the case. In fact, it wasn't even close. Instead, a lot of the things that we as a nation thought we had buried, including ethnic and racial animosity, and political and generational warfare amongst ourselves, came gushing through the surface and infecting virtually everything about us. We actually came within a hair's breadth of losing our democracy on January 6th, 2021.
The PBS "Frontline" documentary AMERICA AFTER 9/11, which aired on September 7, 2021, four days before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and just shortly after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, gives us a gripping, and oftentimes stomach-turning, look back at the things that erupted out of the ashes of 9/11, including the first egregious act, an invasion of Iraq whose pretext was a cooked-up lie conceived by then-President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney that Iraq and its loathsome leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in its possession and was in league with Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda, the rogue terrorist leader and group that had actually carried out 9/11. The fact that the corporate news media bought and sold this lie hook, line, and sinker, plus a great deal of prevarications, over the succeeding decade and a half made it, if not inevitable then certainly possible, for a would-be dictator to become president of the United States-which is sadly what happened, in the personage of one Donald Trump. All the while, the cause of the mistrust, the ill-conceived Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures that consumed not only Bush, but also Barack Obama, and which led to Trump, still haunted America.
The documentary, which is both alternately fascinating and outraging in equal measures, culminates with the horror of the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to install Trump as virtually dictator-for-life after he had legitimately lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. And all the while, we as a nation not only had to deal with foreign interventions, but the explosions of racial violence stemming from the May 25, 2020 of George Floyd, and the single worst pandemic the world had seen since 1918.
What AMERICA AFTER 9/11 tells us is that the worse enemy we have to face in the 21st century is no longer some vague threat from overseas; it is within our own borders, and fueled by twenty years of mistrust in our core institutions, a mistrust far worse than anything we even saw during the Vietnam era. We need to seriously come to grips with such a reality and fix things, or the United States may not survive as the beacon of democracy for much longer.