Russia really won in the end
I’m not giving them this W, Bin Laden is the most influential single actor here, there were many more who laid the ground work(the John Birch society, the federalist society, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Luther Pierce, Roger Stone, Murdoch, Limbaugh, and the Koch’s come to mind) but 9/11 was the poison pill that broke the country
It feels to me like people did unite after those attacks…it was the crazy conspiracy theories about them that really seemed to get the ball rolling as far as division goes.
Thing is, Republicans have been using any crisis and our ‘unite behind leadership’ behavior to fuck us since before Reagan, so I’m not sure it’s really such a bad thing that we stopped ‘uniting’.
We united and circled the wagons, everyone that wasn’t with America was against America, that’s what 9/11 did, it gave a spark to an already existing powder keg of latent fascism in the subconscious of America. It destroyed a sense of invincibility that had been growing inside our collective culture, that the struggles were behind us and we’d always be safe, the fear and sense of uncertainty it brought thoroughly cooked the brains of so many Americans that we started distrusting everything and backing into isolation.
Bin Laden won because his goal was to make America bleed, to prove it was vulnerable to its own people, which would and has lead to the place we now stand
Several key individuals can be blamed for this: Ronnie Raygun, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. All worked very very hard to divide the country.
Americans increasingly blame their political rivals for their hardships and show compassion only toward those who share their beliefs.
Ok, I get that you’re saying we need to unite but you can’t heal a wound without removing the necrotic, bacteria laden tissue first. One side is, literally, doing everything in their power to regulate less, pollute more, and scam people into voting against their best interests.
One side reacted to Sandy Hook by saying “never again,” while the other side reacted to say “No, we’ll take more of that please.”
No, its even worse. One side reacted by saying ‘how horrible!’ and offering sympathy and support to the victims, and the other side said ‘it never happened, and all those so-called dead kids were just paid actors!’
How can you unite anyone when a good chunk of them live in an alternate reality?
The only times in our history we united over tragedy was when others leveraged the collective racism of the country to present a new target.
