Terrorists attacked. America surrendered.

Thirty years ago, a small group of terrorists, backed by some of the same men America had once used to combat the USSR, identified a potential weakness in the transportation system. Over the next five years, they planned to exploit this weakness, eventually spending around $400,000 to train the necessary agents and put them in place.

Then they killed 2,977 people and inflicted over $1 trillion in damage.

In the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, America took largely sensible actions. Planes were grounded in case the attack was even wider than it seemed. Resources were funneled into massive rescue and cleanup operations. Investigations moved quickly to identify those behind the attack. Allies were called to help defend the nation against an enemy that was unlike those we had fought in the past.

Then we went out and spent $8 trillion to kill at least 650,000 people, the majority of whom lived in a nation with no connection to the attack.

What happened on 9/11 shocked the world. The horror of that morning remains an incomprehensible shock. The loss is still deeply felt. But the greater disaster didn’t come in the hours of flame and smoke. It happened slowly over weeks, months, and years. Which only makes it worse.

It took one month to pass the Patriot Act, vastly expanding the surveillance state and gutting both the First and Fourth Amendments. It took another year to pass the Homeland Security Act, which created the Department of Homeland Security and its domestic enforcement wing, ICE. It took less than 18 months for the United States to completely falsify the justification for a two-decade war on an uninvolved nation.

For a brief moment, it seemed that those in Washington still had some grasp on the danger they were risking and the damage it could do to this nation. Many of the worst provision of the Patriot Act were set to expire on December 31, 2005. But living in fear becomes a habit. So the act was extended. Then extended again. Then again as part of the deceptively-named Freedom Act. Surveillance was normalized.

DHS brought together powers that had been distributed and balanced among agencies and organizations. It supercharged this massed power, then it gave it a huge militarized force. Unquestioned obedience was normalized.

America passed from a nation of immigrants to one of “real Americans“ and “vermin” not all at once, but in stages. Stages like cancer. Because fear of the other, once it’s internalized, once it’s authorized, once it’s empowered, can’t help but spread.

Now that fear has given us a masked internal security force that can detain, deport, and murder with no warrants, restrictions, or consequences. We have leaders who demand an oath, not to the nation or the constitution, but to their personal authority. We have children stepping off the school bus to find that their parents have been taken away.

We’re also a nation that is increasingly friendless, isolated, and unable to exert either diplomatic or military force. If the purpose of the 9/11 attacks was to reduce the U.S. presence in the Middle East, that goal has now been achieved.

When a flu epidemic killed millions of people around the world in 1918, it wasn’t the virus that directly caused the damage. Something in that flu caused the body’s own immune system to overreact. Otherwise strong and healthy people were strangled by the systems that were supposed to protect them.

On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, one thing is clear: The damage done that day has metastasized across decades. It wasn’t just towers that fell, it was what we were willing to trade in exchange for the illusion of safety.

It’s not too late for America to heal, but Osama bin Laden would be delighted with where we are today.