What we destroyed 25 years ago

I can’t call it an anniversary, because it’s not something to be celebrated. I can’t describe it as a commemoration, because it’s not something I want to recall or commemorate. Nor do the words eulogy or remembrance or memorial or tribute feel right, because the words don’t convey the trauma and horror.

Perhaps merely the 25th year of observance.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, my family and I walked in silence to a Friends meetinghouse a few blocks away from our home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’d never been to that meetinghouse before, but it seemed fitting and necessary. We needed to sit in silence with others.

That morning, I’d been scheduled to take a plane from Boston to San Francisco. I remember feeling momentarily irked that it had been canceled because of the attack, as if to tell myself that the world could and should go on as before, as if to pretend I couldn’t have been on one of the planes that went down.

The nation’s coping mechanisms were soon in full flight and fight. George W. Bush had been rushed away from a photo op and whisked onto a plane that went into a secret flight path.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld started to plot the fight that would take the lives of some 4,500 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and the detention — inside a network of overseas prisons known as “black sites” — of 119 Muslim men, at least 39 of whom were tortured. About 15 of them remain to this day at the Guantánamo Bay military prison.

Nativism and islamophobia soared in America.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established on November 15, 2002, when Bush signed into law the Homeland Security Act, designed to fight terrorism. It officially began operations on March 1, 2003.

ICE was created in 2003 and placed within DHS. Fighting terrorism quickly became the framework by which ICE approached immigration.

Trump’s police state is a direct descendant, along with its ICE agents deployed across the country, detention centers now imprisoning 65,765 people, mass deportations, and surveillance technology — including some 120,000 Flock cameras in 49 states that capture 20 billion license plates a month, along with dents, bumper stickers, and other identifying features.

For the past quarter century, opportunistic politicians and pundits — not the least, Trump — have encouraged Americans to fear Muslims and Islam, a religion practiced by 1.6 billion people around the world.

It is our solemn duty not just to remember what happened 25 years ago but to acknowledge and repudiate the brutality it summoned in America.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.