9/11 + 10

I've lived in and visited several nations afflicted with chronic terrorist attacks by organized, aggrieved groups, and know enough about others to feel reasonably confident about an observation and conclusion. In all but one nation, these attacks are regarded as serious outrages against the public order, but life goes on as near normal as possible, and the necessary security against future attacks is a minor annoyance. The exception of course is the USA, where a single attack ten years ago, admittedly a dramatic and horrible attack that killed several thousand and destroyed two iconic skyscrapers seems to have induced a permanent and fundamentally harmful change in the American psyche and way of life. The IRA attacks in Britain, ETA's in Spain, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish separatists in Turkey, all lasted for decades and I think all killed and maimed more people, but for the affected nations and their people, life has gone on more or less normally. I came back to North America from a brief visit to Greece and Turkey and went straight on to the USA in November 2004. The contrast was glaringly obvious. The USA has become the Paranoid States of America. The paranoia seems to me to have become greater as time passes, reaching a crescendo as the 10th anniversary of the outrage approaches; and it has affected Canada's present leader who remarked a few days ago that the greatest threat facing Canada is "Islamicism", whatever that is. The remark understandably has made Canadian Muslims nervous, and stigmatized them withal. But this is a trivial distraction compared to the disruption of American life by the aftermath of that attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The Department of Homeland Security has become a massive money-eating monster with intrusive tentacles that touch millions. Air travelers meekly empty their pockets, remove their coats and their shoes to go through the security station between the check-in desk and the departure lounge. I wonder how many know that shoes are are removed also before entering a mosque. Many thousands are on a secretive "No-Fly" list which is Kafka-esque in its operation. Once on this list, even mistakenly as seems to have been quite common, the sentence and the stigma are life-long. I don't think we should be commemorating what 19 men with box-cutters brought about that day. And for good measure, a pox on Homeland Security.