Today is the yearly anniversary of 9/11/01 aka the most recent foreign attack on American soil. Or allegedly foreign attack.

And so schoolteachers across America are trying to address the subject with their students. Students who weren't even alive when it happened sixteen years ago.

As I ponder this your struggle, a quote comes to mind:

"‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana

If there is one lesson that you will consider telling your students, perhaps you should emphasize the mistakes that we made were directly caused by our fear. Trace the lines back to our deep emotional reaction. How we embraced it. And how it changed us.

Because we've let our emotions lead us since that day. And we paid a much higher prices than we had to.

Emotions didn't kill 3,000 people that day, but they did lead us to invade Iraq resulting in more than 268,000 deaths. And likely much more than that.

Emotions didn't win us our right to privacy, but they did push us to give it away via the Patriot Act shortly after the attack.

Emotions haven't make airports more safe, but they did make them far less convenient by instituting the TSA.

No, if terrorists attacked us for our freedom on 9/11/01, then they won. Not by killing 3,000 people, but by scaring us into attacking our own freedom.

3,000 people is a miniscule number in the grand scheme of things. Consider that more than 30,000 people die on the road every year in the USA alone. If we were rational beings, we would be 10X more scared of getting into a car than we would be of terrorist attacks.

And that number should actually be even lower. Only if a new 9/11 happened every year would it rise to 1/10th the danger that riding in a car poses.

But because of that attack, we gave up our right to privacy, we tolerate indefinite detention, we invaded two nations, we sacrificed our soldiers, and we have spent trillions.

Trillions with a T. And that is not money we had laying around. It was borrowed from ourselves to ourselves to pay the military industrial complex. It was taken as an IOU and has yet to be paid back. A decision that baby boomer politicians made. But baby boomers won't pay it. It is the millennials who will pay back that sum or else pass it on to our children.

George Washington rightly called this out as intergenerational theft.

Avoid occasions of expense. . . and avoid likewise the accumulation of debt not only by shunning occasions of expense but by vigorous exertions to discharge the debts, not throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.

– George Washington

That is the legacy of 9/11. The lesson is that fear is not rational. Fear makes us do stupid things.

And in the aftermath of 9/11, America forgot who we were.

We forgot that we are supposed to mistrust the government. We forgot that giving them power only backfires in the end. We forgot that the best way to respond to a bully is to do the opposite of what he wants.

When we should have embraced freedom and liberty, be turned on it. We have shot ourselves in the foot. And all because we let our emotions guide our actions.

By our actions, we turned a miniscule victory by the terrorists into a massive one. We ourselves made their attack meaningful because it cost us both civil liberties and trillions of dollars - neither of which had they won on that day. Oh no, we didn't have to respond that way. We chose to. And by doing so we made the act of a few radicals all the more effective.

The Lesson

A central lesson to teach the next generation is to learn from our mistakes. That takes humility and the willingness to admit that we were wrong. We do future Americans a disservice if we do not admit our failures as well as our successes. Candy-coating history may be good for the ego, but it's bad for the brain.

Children should be taught that they themselves are susceptible to this very human fault. That if they do not choose to be rational now, then when the next tragedy strikes, they too can be sucked up into the endless cycle of reaction and blowback.

We need to teach them to shun emotional reactions, not to embrace them.

Teach them that just as driving in cars is an acceptable risk in exchange for travel, so must we accept some risk in exchange for liberty.

That includes tolerating different religions - even for Muslims.

That includes tolerating trials - even for enemy combatants.

That includes tolerating privacy - even for suspicious folk.

We need to teach the next generation what it means to be American. Not living in fear of danger, but being brave in spite of danger. That is the pioneer spirit. That is the culture our national was founded upon. "Give me liberty or give me death."

And always remember:

Those who would sacrifice liberty for security will lose both and deserve neither.