Good morning #nostr. ☀️🫂

On September 11, 2001, I was living less than 7 miles away from the site of the horrifying attacks on the World Trade Center. I didn’t see or hear it happen, and wasn’t watching TV that morning, so I was informed by a phone call. One of the two planes had flown directly over my home and I didn’t even realize it.

I spent the next month in a state of shock and confusion, glued to cable news, radio, and the internet. Real-time online news at the time barely existed, so information moved at a different speed than it does today. The 24-hour networks didn’t know how to respond, so they just kept airing the same clips over and over again with non commercial breaks. There was so much bad reporting, and people taking advantage of the situation to intentionally spread misinformation and disinformation. Our governments were complicit in this, of course. We saw it happen right before our eyes just a couple of years later with the relentless march to invade an uninvolved country with an entirely fabricated reason. And yet we somehow accepted it as a nation and as a world, because we were conditioned to out of fear. I couldn’t believe others didn’t see what I saw, and realized just how easily people around me had been manipulated.

We were constantly reminded to say, “Never forget.” to honor those who died in the attacks on our country. I won’t, and I can’t. I lived through it all. But we should also #NeverForget how 22 years ago, we gave up our privacy and civil liberties, started a generation-long war, and accepted an ever-expanding surveillance state that was once only the domain of dystopian science fiction. 

Finally, in this timeline, the technologies and tools have been built and handed to us that could begin to turn the tide against all of these abuses of power. I only hope enough of us use them to matter.