September 11, 2001 was perhaps the darkest day in U.S. history, when 3,000 innocent American citizens were killed in a brutal terrorist attack that toppled buildings, shook the country to its core and reshaped world history in the span of a few hours.
January 6, 2021 was not a great day for America. But it also wasn't... you know... anywhere near the level of Sept. 11.
Right? Do we have to say this
Apparently we have to say this:
Uh huh. Yes, I'm sure it is indeed "weird and painful" to actually utter those words. Your conscience is trying to tell you something, lady!
In the New York Times, meanwhile:
Ever since insurrectionists invaded the Capitol, we've heard that Jan. 6 closed a chapter in American history. No longer should America's most threatening enemies be understood as foreign — a euphemism for Muslim — but instead as domestic, a euphemism for primarily white Americans on the far right.
Uh huh. Well, let's think about this for a moment: In addition to killing 3,000 other Americans, the 9/11 terrorists had originally planned to literally destroy the U.S. Capitol. The Jan. 6 rioters, meanwhile—dumb as they were—kinda meandered around for a bit and caused a little mayhem and then booked it. Which is worse? It's really kind of an open question, isn't it?
In the Poughkeepsie Journal:
On the street outside Grand Central Terminal [on Sept. 11], I gazed downtown at the heavy black billows in the clear blue sky. A radio in a cab stopped at the light blared the news that a plane had also crashed into the Pentagon and another had been hijacked. It felt like an episode of The Twilight Zone. I didn't feel that way again until Jan. 6, 2021, when I watched the siege of the Capitol unfold on TV.
Plenty of people watched the siege of the U.S. Capitol on television. The healthier types among them did not view it as the equivalent of a coordinated mass murder event.
And at PBS:
"Who are we? And what do we want to do as a nation? We answered that question too simply on 9/11: We're the ‘good guys,'" journalist and author Tom Ricks, formerly of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, says in America After 9/11. "And 20 years later, we found out that we are the enemy, that the biggest national security threat facing the United States is internal."
Did we really find that out, though? That seems a bit of an exaggeration. Let's check back in after another 20 years.
For the love.
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