A little while ago, I wrote about a book that described ten days that unexpectedly changed the US. I said that, if I got a chance, that I'd throw in my thoughts regarding different days that could fall under this category as well.
I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. I came up with three more dates. One is obvious, the other two not so much.
Let's start with the most obvious date, 09/11/2001. A massive terrorist attack under a Republican conservative administration, there were some changes that were definitely going to happen and so were expected. Clearly, the US was going to invade Afghanistan, the host country of Al Qaeda. Given the semi-obsession that Bush / Cheney had with Saddam Hussein, it wasn't exactly a shock that the US invaded Iraq, even though clearly Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.
There was some fallout from 9/11 that I did not expect (although in hindsight, I probably should have). I did not expect that my civil rights would almost immediately start eroding. Within two months of 9/11, the PATRIOT act was passed. Suddenly the wall that prevented our foreign intelligence services from investigating US citizens on US soil vanished. Once that ball started rolling, it never stopped and it's still rolling now. In the 1970s, the East German secret police, the Stasi, was the most feared organization in terms of collecting data about its citizens. Well, after 9/11, the Stasi look like incompetent stumblebums. We learned from Edward Snowden about the myriad of ways that our government now keeps watch over us.
And it wasn't just the government. Bolstered by this new environment in which we seemed to have voluntarily given up our right to privacy, private corporations have also gotten into the data vacuuming business. This is inarguably worse because the government at least theoretically operates under our authorization (the whole We The People thing). Our right of privacy is gone, never to be seen again.
The other unexpected result from 9/11 that I did not see coming (although again, maybe I should have) was the militarization of the police. I still remember when policeman wore light blue uniforms and were considered peace officers. Now, all the police that I ever see are dressed in black and are bulked up wearing flak jackets
The US military accelerated this process by making its equipment widely available to law enforcement. Suddenly, the police have what certainly appear to be combat vehicles. They have state of the art weaponry. At one time, the LAPD somehow ended up with grenade launchers.
You give men new toys to play with and, guess what, they're going to play. SWAT no-knock warrants are up over an order of magnitude compared to before 9/11 and no, I seriously doubt that our country is ten times more violent now than then.
In many neighborhoods, the police now function more as an occupying force than trying to keep the peace. If the terrorists wanted to change our way of life, it's hard to say that they did not succeed.
A date that few people will recognize is 11/21/1969. That was the date that the first two computer sites were permanently linked via ARPANET.
For those of you that are not computer geeks, ARPANET is the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. It was a Department of Defense project. Looking at its wiki page, its original purpose was a bit murky. The story that I heard was that the DoD wanted to build a distributed computing network that could survive a nuclear attack. Some people claim that wasn't its original purpose. The DoD simply recognized that each of its distinct research projects had its own silo of immense computing power and they wanted to develop an efficient way of sharing resources.
Be that as it may, it was the first network that followed the TCP/IP network. Essentially, those two nodes were the first two of what would eventually be known as the internet.
Talk about unexpectedly changing the world. Whether it was originally intended to survive a nuclear war or just to more efficiently manage resources, the internet today, for good or bad, has fundamentally changed the world in ways that could never have been imagined. Whether its porn or toilet paper on demand or having one application be shared by nearly three billion users or having nearly all of the world's information available in your pocket or, as mentioned in the 9/11 consequences, a near complete loss of privacy, the internet has fundamentally changed the world, not just the US.
Here's another date that I pretty much guarantee that no one will recognize. The date is 04/30/2011. Barack Obama is president. This was during the nonsense when the latest right wing conspiracy theory was that Obama was not born in the US. There were demands to see his birth certificate. Leading this charge was Donald Trump. Trump had, in the past, flirted with running for president but had always demurred. Trump's two priorities were (are) to grift as much money as possible from unsuspecting suckers and idolatrous adulation. Occasionally threatening to run for president apparently scratched both itches and he'd back out once he was sated.
Well, on 04/30/2011, justifiably annoyed at Trump's fanning the flames of the birth certificate conspiracy, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama mocked Trump. Trump was in the audience and was humiliated by the laughter that greeted Obama's jokes. If you believe Roger Stone (and you should really never believe Roger Stone, but...), that was the moment that Trump decided that he was really going to run for president.
If true, that was truly an unexpected result. A couple of jokes quite literally changed the course of history. If Trump didn't run, there was a whole stable of Republican candidates ranging from the son/brother of a President (Jeb Bush) to a Black man (Ben Carson) to a Hispanic man (Marco Rubio) to a woman (Carly Fiorina) to the guy whose father took part in JFK's assassination (Ted Cruz, if you believe Donald Trump, and you should definitely never believe Trump). In 2012, after the debacle of losing, what to the Republicans was a very winnable election, there was a whole playbook about broadening the Republican constituency. This could have led to a Republican party that maybe even could have found some room for me.
Instead, we got Trump spewing hatred to predominately older white voters. We got the laziest, most ignorant, and most incompetent President in our country's history. Because his ego refused to recognize that he lost, we now have tens of millions of people that believe that our democracy is rigged. It's no exaggeration to say that our future as a democratic nation is now at risk.
All because of a couple of jokes.
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