There will be those events that change our lives forever, many of which we don't think about because they happened before many were even aware of how things used to be. For example, the changes introduced due to 9/11.
Things definitely changed for anyone Arabic-looking, at least for a while, and for people in certain countries (or the military). It probably changed a lot for various aspects of immigration, which I suspect had downstream effects I don't recognize as being due to 9/11. But overall, I continued to live my life as normal.
COVID is pretty much the only event where I see real, lasting changes.
Are there things I'm missing about 9/11? Or other big events?
It's less noticeable in most rural areas, but some places the police have unexpected access to hardware. Think of towns of ~1000 people that have anti-riot vehicles. That kind of access came after increased security spending after 9/11. A lot of police departments saw it as money from the heavens and were worried that if they didn't spend it, they wouldn't get more of it.
There has also been an increase in police officers carrying gear that used to be restricted to SWAT teams. I've worked in a couple major cities where every day I had to walk past cops that were basically just standing around with an M4A1 strapped across their chest and their hand resting on the grip.
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The mortgage crisis around 2008 completely changed the way that homes are bought and sold. If you bought a home before that time you had to do way less paperwork and way less work to prove that you can afford the McMansion you just bought.
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The dot-com crash in the 90's fundamentally changed how startups are funded and valued. Before that crash startups didn't need to have any plan to profitability. VC decks were basically:
1. Steal underpants
2. ???
3. Go public
4. Profit
> Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, with under 7,000 residents, received 10 helicopters, a mine-resistant armored vehicle, two Humvees, and other equipment worth over $6.5 million. Officials claim these transfers help with “counterterrorism” operations, but it seems unlikely that Winthrop Harbor has a terrorism problem that requires 10 helicopters to address.
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
I think this was medium-true for a couple years, and now very rarely true, though depends exactly what you mean. People take photos and videos inside airports and subways all the time—I've never been accosted when doing it. I see videos of trains stations, subway stations, and railroad tracks all the time.
> Or try entering any New York City subway - there are random bag checks and inspection points created as a direct response to 9/11.
There definitely is much more surveillance and random security nonsense than before. It's a valid point that it's not something you only come across with the TSA.
A lot of this security nonsense should be rolled back, obviously, but the reason people don't rebel is because....it mostly doesn't affect most people. Helps to be white, of course. As I said, Arabic people, and anyone who even looks possibly-Arabic, had a really hard time for a while, and are still facing a lot of unearned abuse.
I think more of what 9/11 did is change the trajectory of the many systems that didn't yet exist at the time it happened. And it's hard to say what would have been had it not happened, and had we not seen the rise of the surveillance state. But you don't end up with the apparatus that Snowden revealed without at least some of that underlying architecture affecting the end-user experience.
The department of homeland security and basically everything snowden brought us. The war in Iraq. The war in Afhangistan. Millions of refugees and impacted soldiers and families at home. The bringing back of militarized equipment and approaches into the cops at home.
It affected people in the military a lot—I mentioned that. It massively effected people in certain other countries, as I mentioned.
But for the majority of people living in the US, what changed?
We are all subjected to drastically more surveillance, and militarized policing, as a result of the events that day, even those of us lucky enough to be insulated from the direct kinetic impacts of the war we started as a result of it. To say nothing of extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial killings, and the trillions of our tax dollars wasted on a war against a regime that had nothing to do with the event itself. We could have made a much better world, for that money.
edit: "We" meaning citizens of the US, although to a large degree these impacts are not only felt by US citizens.
The surveillance and other Patriot Act changes were very bad. As much as I hate and have railed against them from the start, they don't have a real, tangible effect on most people in the way COVID did, but they're a real problem, and clearly direct result of 9/11.
Everyone of a certain age knows at least one of their schoolmates or college friends that died in the war.
The US government used the occasion to assassinate American citizens abroad with drones with no due process.
Everything you say or do on the Internet is tracked not only by advertisers but by the US government itself.
Trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians are dead thanks to the war and sanctions conducted by the US. This ended up being a complete waste in Afghanistan due to the Taliban immediately retaking the country.
If you can't see these as impacts then it's because your separation from them is a privilege.
What age? As I said, I was 19 at the time. For Americans, we're looking at ~2500 for Afghanistan and another ~5000 for Iraq. That's several times fewer than the number of high schools.
A lot more were wounded. There's a good chance most people knew someone wounded in one of the wars. But "someone I know was killed" is true with or without the wars.
If the number of fatal car accidents increased by 5%, would you say this was a major change to our day to day life? That would take about three years to exceed the total US deaths from both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars over their entire many-year time span.
To couch your arguments in a death count is quite lazy.
I didn't come up with deaths as the metric. Notice that only one comment mentions people being wounded: mine.
9/11 directly contributed to the massive increase in spying against citizens and illegal activities. The fact that you don't see an issue with this, means just how successful it was in doing so.
It also has no noticeable, tangible effect on my life, or the lives of most people. It's a big problem that fucks a small number of people in a way that's semi-random.
Actually...this isn't 100% true. Abu Ghraib, and specifically Sen Inhofe's "outaged at the outrage" response, helped prompt me to donate 33% of my income to charity for several years in part. At the time, I thought that was the maximum I could deduct and I wanted to minimize the amount of tax dollars I sent to a government that was actively torturing people. My savings would be vastly larger if not for Abu Ghraib.
True, but only because you misspelled "affected" ;)
Edit: Downvote me harder, fascists
9/11 gave the government, especially the federal government, much more power than it had before, which means everyone's slice of that power grew, but I'm not convinced that it's all that responsible for the slice for the executive branch having grown to be such a large share as it was already there before the attack.
The "imperial presidency" was pretty much a linear progression for decades before 9/11; 9/11 didn't materially impact it, and definitely didn't "bring it back" as if it had gone somewhere between when it was first identified and 9/11,