link to original reddit post by /u/GoldAndBlackRule
I was working as a game dev in Austin, Texas. The news hit before I left for work. I was already a hard core liberty advocate even then.
Work was cancelled that day. I saw the news unfolding. I was angry at the assholes that flew the planes into buildings full of people. I knew that US foreign policy was not in any position of innocence.
I grew up in the 1970s watching the Middle East melt down and later learned about the Cold War game of Tic-Tac-Toe the 1st and 2nd world were playing (please, let's not call it chess).
W.O.P.R. said it best simulating the strategy of ultimate state violence: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
What rapidly unfolded before my eyes was exactly what I feared and warned my left/right peers about: a crisis that would end any scraps of liberty remaining in the USA. I begged them not to cheer thier respective teams on, because it would be a slippery slope into despotism. I was, of course, called a kook. "That would never happen," I was told. They still cheer their teams on today.
As we all know, my position was correct. Libertarians are eerily precient.
I joined the LP as a chairman. I was active. Disobedient. Certain that there was still a chance to steer the bus full of my fellows away from the cliff's edge and not go kareening into the abyss of a totalitarian police state.
Then I saw how the political sausage is made. I went from begrudging yet optimistic minarchist to a feeling of absolute disgust with the very notion of the state. I expatriated. I have been living semi-statelessly for a very long time now.
And with each passing week, it is clear that the bus had long driven over the cliff's edge.
So, this September 11th, while it was never really anything more than the long-awaited catalyst for a blatant political power-grab, is a day of remembrance of what could have been and is now utterly destroyed. Perhaps that is for the best, as the patient was terminal long before September 11th, 2001.