Time passes and perspective changes. The horror of that day fades and what remains is the damage that was done in the name of protecting the country from danger. The overarching result was the surveillance state which as we’ve seen doesn’t protect us from foreign threats but instead is a weapon against Americans. The Patriot Act and all the other measures that have been put in place to monitor our every word, action and even thought is a monstrous law that has changed the very nature of our relationship to our government. It is literally 1984’s Ministry of Love. It combines complete surveillance of the citizenry with unlimited power to punish of anyone who objects to it. And now with the capture of the internet through proxies like Google and Facebook we have the Ministry of Truth instituted too. Free speech is seen to be non-existent as any attempts to contradict the Ministry of Truth’s pronouncements are erased from the network.
Looking back to where we were twenty-one years ago, we can see that we have lost our freedoms and gained nothing of security. It was all a lie. The only question is can we undo what has been done. There are two mechanisms. If we had a majority in Congress and a President who both wanted to repeal the Patriot Act it could be done. Currently even if the Republicans controlled the Congress there are too many Senators who work for the military industrial complex and would never dream of curtailing its power. The other way it could be done would be to have the Supreme Court find the Patriot Act unconstitutional. That would work. I wonder if the Justice Department and the other parts of the Security State would just ignore the Supreme Court and just continue on with their abuses of power. It might only serve to prove that we are no longer living under a constitutional government but under a junta instead.
September Eleventh highlights that our government relies on the good will of the people running it to keep it honest. What is plain to see is that Obama and his regime completely corrupted the security apparatus and now that they’ve gotten a taste for unlimited power, they have no intention of backing away from it.
It will take a concerted effort by all branches of the government; President, Congress and Supreme Court to undo the damage that has been inflicted on our freedoms by the Patriot Act and the other surveillance and control methods. The problem is how do we reach a national consensus to build up that concerted effort? So many Americans benefit from the current regime. They’ve been bought off with money and programs that allow them to coast along.
So that brings us to the possibility that it’s already too late to undo the harm. If that’s the case then the present regime will have to go through the evolution that all diseased states experience. The discrepancies between reality and the narrative that the government enforces will eventually lead to massive dysfunction. And without a feedback mechanism to correct these problems the whole titanic structure of the bureaucracy will crumble under its own weight. It took seventy years for the Soviet Empire to suffer this kind of catastrophic failure. Maybe the American Empire will take another hundred years. Or maybe it’s already starting to tear itself apart. A case could be made for either scenario.
But what I’ve decided is that the 2022 election is the test case for me. The disastrous consequences of the Left’s agenda are on full display. If this does not provide enough impetus to the American electorate to throw out the Democrats, en masse, then nothing ever will. What we’ll end up with is the situation in Massachusetts where the excesses of the hyper-progressive left are balanced off every eight or twelve years with some squishy Republican who pumps out the water from the sinking ship of state and restores some semblance of sanity until the next spasm of progressive insanity sweeps in another madman who proceeds to sink the ship again.
So, I’m looking for signs that people have had enough. I can see some hope in places like Florida and Texas where Democrat voters are switching sides. But so far these are isolated cases. We’ll need to see it spreading to places like Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania. So far, the polls are inconclusive. But it’s less than two months until we’ll know.
A sad day.