Exactly. I was a white American growing up in the shadow of 9/11. The only real impacts on my life were things like the patriot act and the cultural paranoia and jingoism. At no point in my life have I ever been more likely to die in an Islamist terror attack than a christofascist one. And after all that killing, what did we get? Cheaper oil, more money for the richest people, and a lot of traumatized troops.

I’ve always known middle eastern folks of all sorts, from American born citizens to people just here for school. They have had it worse because of this. Their stories are theirs to share, but the fact from my perspective is I see all too often that people of such backgrounds are pleasantly surprised when I treat them like fellow human beings who have just as much right to be here as I do. That’s not ok, those who are citizens are just as American as me, and those who aren’t are guests in my country.

And people like you have it worst by far. You can’t bomb a region into stability. You can’t extract enough wealth from a group that they stop hating you. No child deserves to live in that kind of fear. And we know damn well we didn’t care about the people of the region because we helped topple plenty of republics with values similar to our own, most notably in Iran when we supported the rise of the Ayatollah.

I hate Americans talking about what a tragedy 9/11 was. We had been destabilizing half the planet for half a century at that point and finally someone decided to attack us in response. Fuck that. Also when capital is why we destabilized the world why wouldn’t the World Trade Center, the pentagon, and the White House be legitimate targets?