Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Remembering 9/11

While everyone is thanking our military for protecting our freedoms, and rightly so, I can't help but think of all the freedoms we have lost since 9/11/01. We can't get on an airplane without taking off our shoes or belts. We've been subjected to full body scans. We can't walk into a government building without passing through a metal detector. All of our emails and phones calls are monitored for terrorist keywords. Our government has tortured people and held them without due process. We have targeted American citizens with drone strikes. We are paranoid about every non-white person who happens to be within 100 miles of a border. We get stopped by Border Patrol within our own country. We have lawmakers that are actively trying to reduce the number of people that can vote in a democracy. I recognize that we still have far more freedoms than most people in this world, and those freedoms are being protected by a strong military presence throughout the world, but I have to wonder if it has all been worth the cost?
Here is a post from a Facebook friend that is very scary to contemplate.  I haven't attempted to verify these numbers, but they don't seem out of line with what I have heard in the past,

R.I.P. The 2,976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11, and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and the 1,690,903 Iraqi and the 35,000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit.

And that doesn't even include the U.S. troops who lost their lives.  The numbers are staggering.  Are we really winning the war on terrorism?

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