Post-9/11 America
For those of you who did, what was it like growing up in that atmosphere?
I hated it. Hated the sudden, seemingly-unquestioned shift towards authoritarianism...hated how seemingly everything else went to shit...
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For those who don't get the reference, it's something from Chrono Trigger, an SNES game where you spend the beginning getting into trouble with a time travel device and accidentally getting yourselves involved in some conflicts between rival kingdoms. But soon, you find yourself accidentally traveling to the far future, and discovering that something much greater than any petty conflict has destroyed your world, leaving it in shattered ruins and leaving what survivors there are with little hope. And the rest of your story is trying to find ways to prevent that from happening.
My political involvement up 'til then was mainly being angry that Gore was denied a proper recount in Florida. So I'd seen some conflicts, both in the high school social scene and in the "professional" political realm of the country. But 9/11 was a gamechanger. It basically revealed to me that there's a much, much bigger plotline going on, of a scale far, far beyond the petty day-to-day conflicts that I had yet seen.
I was skeptical of stuff like the PATRIOT Act. (I also disliked Bush for other reasons, such as pulling the US out of the Kyoto Protocol.) I supported military action in Afghanistan in 2001, but I then strongly opposed military action in Iraq in 2003 (though I do not at all pretend that the former had no downsides nor the latter no upsides). I did briefly become interested in foreign policy, even taking a class on it, but my own political opinions/activity has gradually shifted toward domestic issues rather than foreign relations (as I find domestic issues more directly salient with regards to the effects of policymaking on voters, and foreign relations have proven far, far harder to speak airtightly about them).
I was always against the war in Iraq, even if Hussein was a horrible man...the war in Iraq did give us ISIS, didn't it?
The best way I've found for interpreting it is to understand a few principles:
* There is no single cause, for most things. There may be an obvious "trigger" or "catalyst", but there are a huge number of possibly relevant causes for many things. And these causes can change.
* There is, often, no single motive for many things. This means that any single action can have motives that one deems "good" and motives that one deems "bad", at the same time. This doesn't mean you can't make decisions at all either -- you have to decide what things are more important, if you're a policymaker. And you'll get flak from somebody no matter what you do, but you still have to do it.
* Unintended consequences are a frequent result of broad-scale policy decisions, and foreign relations abound with such examples. For example, 2001 US military action in Afghanistan did bring down the Taliban and Al Qaeda...but it's left the US participating in a long-term military commitment with no end in sight. On the other hand, 2003 US military action in Iraq was a waste of treasure and lives for the sake of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, but deposing Saddam Hussein likely stemmed the ecological damage to the wetlands between the Tigris and Euphrates and the genocide of the Marsh Arabs.
* It's almost never simply a "zero sum game" where there's only a fixed amount of advantage/benefit to go around. The parameters of the problem can frequently be changed.
Mostly what I remember people talking about after 9-11 is the anticipation for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. At the time, I thought that the twin towers thing was a demolition or an accident or a sad and scary movie that makes adults upset (like Schindler's list) and I didn't realize how much of the anticipation was connected to the fear that the games would be attacked, and how much of the hype was the adults reassuring themselves that things like the Olympics were still happening and needing something else to focus on.
Something big had happened that was beyond my ability to comprehend, and I knew it was beyond my understanding and that it was something sad and terrible. I'd never been anywhere with skyscrapers, and I'd only seen planes as part of the sky, not as a physical thing I could ever touch or interact with. But the Olympics, I could (and did) see in person.
The whole "flags in every yard" thing just reminded me of Veterans day and the thing the boy scouts do where they put flags everywhere, and we were already saying the pledge of allegiance every day in school.
Also, my little sister was born in December 2001, so my recollections of that time are more about her than anythhing else.
Heck, I felt more of an aftermath from the Challenger disaster, because my uncle worked at ATK-thiokol and my cousin said his job was in trouble, and I was terrified that my cousins would have to move away from the house next door.
I guess, what I'm saying is, I was a selfish little provincial brat who only noticed local stuff.
Were the 2002 SLC games a huge cultural thing outside of Utah?
IIRC the SLC Olympics became a big thing again on the national stage during the 2012 campaign wherein Mitt Romney touted that as an example of his success at managing something big.