1) Been having a hard time this week. At first I thought it was from digging back into a horribly violent death case, advising the counsel. Then I thought it was my PTSD/depression. Maybe it was the smoke in our skies right now. The covid isolation. Then I realized it was

2) 9/11 today. I’m bad with dates. Really bad. But not with 9/11. This year, while I still thought of all those who died, I couldn’t help wondering if 9/11 had never happened, would we be imm this moment. If it had never happened would we have built this giant DHS? The one with

3) little oversight and even less accountability? Would we have allowed CBP and Border Patrol to double its size even though illegal crossings had dropped to their lowest numbers since the 70’s? Would we have torn children from their parents because they requested asylum?

4) Built a third wall in front of the other two? I can’t help but think that some of these things may have never come to pass. And I’m not here to argue about what would or wouldn’t have happened. I do see many of these things as a reaction to the fear and trauma we faced and

5) still deal with as a nation. But are we really any safer? We’ve given up many of our rights and freedoms to these agencies. Even allowed them to make the decisions without congressional oversight with the idea that they knew how to keep us safe. But are you safer? They, their

6) surveillance and their walls have prevented some threats. But how much is enough? Personally, I look around and see cops beating Americans for protesting, see cops creating violent situations, I see more and more Black men and women dying, I see brown families being separated

7) in a variety of ways, I see nearly 200,000 dead from covid in America alone, the west is on fire, the east is under hurricane watches, our troops have bounties on their heads and the 1% keep getting more and more tax breaks. That’s not yo say that government cannot work.

8) It simply means that the road we are on is not working. 9/11 seems to provide new lessons every year. For me, this year is about how succumbing to fear and the need to feel safe often lead to more fear and less safety.