9/11 is the litmus test.

So many of the things that reverberate to today are based on the unwillingness to demand full, open and transparent investigations of the attack, the crime scene forensics, and the apparent response failures. Anyone not in lockstep with the coming “payback” was a traitor, and anyone questioning the official narrative was a nutter. That the people so readily dismissing the skeptics, did not heed to call themselves to demand what the commission itself determined; that a proper investigation was needed to uncover the truth.

Remember, the alternate explanation to deride conspiracy, was the supposedly comforting notion that incompetence, an unrelated type of criminality (the destruction of evidence), the desire to cover your butt, and a string of bad luck and/or remarkable coincidence, explained the seeming contradictions and that the right enemy had been targeted anyway, so no time to navel gaze as we needed to get our bloodbath up and running.

This is my recollection as to what I saw and what we lost. I live in So Cal and commute to downtown LA, and have for over 20+ years. For exactly a day and a half (the same amount of time the air stays smog free after a good
rain), the normally selfish and inattentive motorists drove in manner virtually unseen before or since. Over that two day period, they actually showed noticeable consideration and no longer drove oblivious to those around them, not caring who they cut off or didn’t let in or honked at for going too slow, or not getting out of the way fast enough… they treated the other drivers as fellow Americans that were also possibly traumatized or numb and that the default position might be that they would appreciate a random act of kindness from a stranger who might just cut another person a break for no other reason than they thought the anonymous person could use one.

And then, as if it never happened in the first place, it was over. That was how long it took to revert back to type, and embrace dysfunction as normalcy.

And that’s how we got to where we are today.

There are some things in life that we can’t turn back the clock on, but tragically that is true even on those things we could turn back the clock on. We’re just not that smart or that caring, and I don’t think it’s overly pessimistic to say that we never will be.