The Trump Top 10: 2 — Terrorism of and by the American People

On September 11, 2001, I was a recent college graduate, dutifully working at my computer when I heard my coworker Kenny call out, “Terrorism! Terrorism!” I laughed.

At that time, I was 21 years old, and during my lifetime, I only knew terrorism as a theme in action movies. Throughout my youth, terrorists were usually Russian. After that day, they’d usually be depicted in film and television as Middle Eastern.

My initial instinct when I saw footage of the first airplane hit the World Trade Center was that it was a fluke — the radar must have been down or something. Then with the second plane…I naively suspected that, yes, it was a technology problem. What else could it be, I wondered, even with Kenny continuing to call out “terrorism!”

Then an airplane hit the Pentagon — which my father, who worked for the U.S. Department of Defense often visited — and everything changed. I understood terrorism in real-life terms. Next came the Patriot Act and the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Every day, government agencies and news media replayed traumatizing footage, encouraged contempt for foreign and American Muslim people, and conditioned our anxieties to respond to color-coded terrorism warning levels issued daily. Shoes and belts came off at airports; laptops came out of luggage. It was a new U.S.A., and a newly patriotic one, in which patriotism meant assessing our neighbors as potential enemies of the nation.