Found this article here:
http://www.thestar.ca/NASApp/cs/Con...87&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
And while I don't neceissarily agree with everything this man has said, it does provide quite a different viewpoint on things.
Sense of security just an illusion
JAMES TRAVERS
This is not an easy moment to ask hard questions. On this day of this month, grief, the increasingly gaudy theatre of daily life, and relentless pressure to seize political advantage from seminal events, all conspire to make introspection difficult, if not impossible.
But is there a better, more propitious time to reflect and to stick a bookmark in current history? Is there another time when we are more likely to ask if we are now significantly more secure, politically discerning or wise?
The answer to the first question is self-evident, the others elusive.
Two years ago, conventional wisdom held that the intrusion of realities that make much of the rest of the world so dangerous had changed this continent suddenly and forever. Retrospect suggests the conclusion was at best premature and at worst misleading.
Instead of changing everything, the attacks on New York and Washington shifted most things. It is as if the frame around experience and expectation is twisted, unfamiliar and unsettling.
Priorities are changed. Principles that once seemed sacrosanct are devalued, often without much debate. People made anxious by ill-defined threats are more alert but not much less vulnerable.
Those symptoms surface even here in a capital where distance from a new generation's ground zero makes both cause and effect less immediate.
With a sharp eye turned to its nervous neighbour, the federal government is in the 9/11 aftermath giving money and power that would have been spent on health and education to a police and security apparatus that can do more to make us feel protected than to make us safe.
It is playing fast and loose with civil liberties, sliding down a slippery slope that so far has only embarrassed agencies that, freed from the constraints of evidence, are finding ethereal conspiracies.
Most of all, widespread, if ill-defined, fear is a magnet drawing politicians toward tactics that offer only the appearance of leadership.
While some progress has been made, the cumulative effect doesn't inspire confidence.
Perhaps it is the failure to find Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or weapons of mass destruction that makes intelligence seem a one-word oxymoron, but it is surely obvious that the expensively reinforced bricks and mortar can't protect an open society from the outrages of a few closed minds.
Rather than grasp the nettle of discouraging circumstance, the democratic body politic retreats into illusion. Legal rights and the fundamental freedom of privacy are eroded so no politician will have to admit that nothing was done. Leadership is measured by airtime in a 24/7 television universe, not the ability to choose and explain the best of less than perfect options.
It shouldn't be forgotten that George W. Bush found legitimacy for his presidency in catastrophic events. Nor should it be forgotten that the monotonous recital of hopelessly simplistic remedies is failing to accelerate the world toward lasting solutions.
All but ignored by societies distracted by the chaff of network news, Afghanistan teeters near chaos, putting at risk not only the lives of 1,900 Canadians serving there but the modicum of stability and social advancement gained when the Taliban was overthrown.
Once only a minor front in the War on Terrorism, Iraq is reconstructing itself not as an American model in the Middle East but as the locus for evil that Bush first fantasized in justifying a military campaign loaded with ulterior motives.
And, slightly to the west, the region's real open wound bleeds without any promise that the international community will find the courage or prescription to address a problem it chose to let fester for too long.
As important as it is today to remember the 2,792 victims, it is also important to remember that stunning adversity is part of the lives of nations. How they respond is an unwanted, yet crucial, test of their will.
That test will continue for years, perhaps decades. But the early reports are discouraging. After two years, we have only a little more than the illusion of progress, the illusion of security, to show for a continent's fixation on its exposure to a world of troubles.
Profligate spending on highly visible defences have not and will not close the inevitable loopholes in a society that finds its strength in openness.
A foolish war waged for other purposes is giving terrorism an expansive stage and renewed vigour.
And a political process that thrives on the willing suspension of public disbelief is demonstrably more cynical, more manipulative.
It is those questions ? questions about how we got from there to here in just 24 months ? that on this day of pain and remembrance still demand answers.
