Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to

Yep. The world generally felt for us after 9/11, and then the wars started and that really affected public perception. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with it and destabilized an entire region and didn’t find the guy that orchestrated the whole thing for an entire decade. All that along with torturing prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib made us look even worse. Not to mention it really created an “us vs. them” environment in the American homeland which is still ever present if not getting worse. I think Bin Laden was counting on “death by a thousand cuts” aka creeping normality and I believe that was largely successful. Americans seem to have partly turned on each other over political differences. People now have an even larger distrust of the institutions in this country. Empathy seems to have taken a sideline. I’ve seen families broken up and almost experienced it myself. People now spend so much time online in their echo chambers and sometimes refuse to even converse with “the other side”. This goes both ways. With all of this happening I think of this part of Lincoln’s Lyceum Address: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”