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Mark's avatar

The thing I’ll never forget is prior to 9/11 I naively thought the United States was a country that would never officially condone torture regardless of political party.

The horrific realization that millions upon millions of my fellow citizens WANTED to torture other humans haunts me to this day.

I had always thought “well only evil people torture other human beings” so what does that say about all those millions here who supported it and cheered for it? I can only conclude they are no different than those who I thought previously were the evil people.

Then these same millions when given the opportunity to reverse course, to show that maybe they made a horrible mistake, instead decided to make an openly cruel and bigoted orange fascist conman their new Jesus.

These are collective moral failures on such a massive scale forgetting it happened is impossible and it seems the MAGA hat crowd is proud to show us what moral bankruptcy looks like every chance they get.

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SteveB's avatar

I think I can remember the view through that door before they closed it. I was pretty involved in the Global Justice movement at the time, enough that I travelled to Quebec to take part in a massive protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas right after Bush's selection, and I was thrilled by a glimpse of global solidarity, of ordinary people uniting across borders against the bosses, but also FOR something like a better world.

I went to lots of protests after that, too, including what might have been the first large protest against the Afghanistan war, in Washington D.C. before the war even started (and yes, "What are you protesting for? There isn't even a war to protest!" was one of the snappy retorts I heard back then.) That D.C. protest had actually been planned for yet another "Free Trade" meeting that was to take place in D.C. in October, and it was quickly repurposed to an antiwar protest two weeks after the towers came down. And looking back at it now, that's what happened all over, a Global Justice movement that contained, at least partly, an idea of a much better world got repurposed into just NO. And a very necessary NO it was, but it still was just NO. We lost so much, I hope we can get it back some day.

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