I’ve said it before; I knew isomething terrible happened the moment I turned in NPR, and heard public radio personalities trying to ad-lib. Even before I heard the words “airplane”, “terrorist” or “World Trade Center”, I knew something awful was going on; Public Radio people don’t go to the bathroom without a script.

Hard to believe – nobody under the age of 18, officially, was born on 9/11. Some of the soldiers and Marines who’ll be fighting the war that started 18 years ago will have born after the war began. For an entire generation, the war is all of reality.

In case you’ve forgotten:

And say what you will, but Dubya never had a better moment:

After eighteen years, the takeaways are all pretty bad.

Quoting Glenn Reynolds:

One thing I guess I didn’t believe 17 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time. That said, for the first time I feel like our diplomacy is on a good track, and that — thanks also to fracking — the problems that led to 9/11 are being addressed.

God bless America. We need it.

We were given a moment – against our will – when we, a nation, had to react to what is, in the great, historical scheme of things the norm; barbarity, terror, the imposing of ones will onto others via violence. And for a brief moment, we did react. Positively, effectively, and up to the best of this nation’s traditions. But now, 18 years later, we’re even more tribal than we were after the 2000 elections. Perhaps terminally. I’ll add “both sides are responsible”, but you know that’s largely punching a ticket.

And the great lesson of 9/11 was that, when government lets us down – and it did, and always does – the individual stepped up and dealt with what they needed to. The people below the points of impact in the World Trade Center, far from being the mindless cattle that law enforcement expected people to act like, largely organized their own evacuations from the doomed buildings; there were relatively few dead from among those below the floors with the impacts. And passengers on Flight 93 did what would have been unthinkable years before – utterly contrary to the “conventional wisdom” of the day. And yet 9/11’s greatest institutional legacies are a government that treats people even more like cattle (seen those TSA lines lately?), is more intrusive and hamfisted (wiretap laws and militarized police with greater purview to use force for routine interactions), and just plain bigger and dumber.

And in that? The terrorists did win.

Sorry to say.

It’s 9/11 today, as most of you are aware.

If you’re younger than 34, it happened when you were still in school.  And it shouldn’t blow my mind that people who were toddlers on 9/11 have graduated from high school – but it does.

Put another way – if 9/11 were December 7, we’d be in 1956; the war would have ended 12 years ago; Elvis would be at his peak, Germany and Japan would be back from the stone age and rebuilding their economies, and we’d be on the brink of the space race.  Tempus fugit.  

After the attacks, one of the social undercurrents – which morphed, as social currents do, into comedy that often tried too hard – was the notion that if we gave up our freedoms out of fear of terror, then “the terrorists will win”.

So today, 16 years later, government goons grope us in line at airports (but miss all the dangerous stuff anyway), and we don’t complain because, well, we gotta make our flights; the whole exercise seems designed more to train people to get in line and shut up than to find terrorists.

We fill out paperwork if our bank deposits are too big.  We watch as our police departments turn into playtime special forces teams, chasing after pot dealers and trial skippers with armored cars and assault rifles.  We see our Fourth Amendment gradually being reduced to toilet paper – and, in parts of the country where the people are more amenable to presenting their papers on demand, the Second as well.

And on the campuses where the generation that has the same memory of 9/11 that I have of Barry Goldwater (hint:  I was a toddler) are getting “educated”, people are being badgered into line by social codes imposed by self-appointed cultural police no less zealous than the Wahhabi morality police, enforcing a social code that are no less absurd than the rules, and rulers, in Afghanistan 16  years and one day ago today – enforced (!), in some cases, by people whose only difference from ISIS’s morality police is that they haven’t cut off anyone’s head.

Yet.

I’m less and less sure this nation – or at least it’s self-appointed culturaloverlords – learned the right lessons from 9/11.