THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS:

If you are among the lucky who survive, remember this and tell young children about it, when you sit around the campfires at night. This comes via The Blue Bus, by way of The American Street. It is a frightening account of how our protectors have deserted us, by the always interesting and humane Bill Moyers. Go read the whole thing HERE:

This "zeal for secrecy" I am talking about — and I have barely touched the surface — adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon three years ago this morning, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology. If they could fill our psyche with fear — as if the imagination of each one of us were Afghanistan and they were the Taliban — they could deprive us of the trust and confidence required for a free society to work. They could prevent us from ever again believing in a safe, decent or just world and from working to bring it about. By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of the press — that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.

I thought of this last week during the Republican National Convention here in New York — thought of the terrorists as enablers of democracy's self-immolation. My office is on the west side of Manhattan, two blocks from Madison Square Garden. From where I sit I could see snipers on the roof. Helicopters overhead. Barricades at every street corner. Lines of police stretching down the avenues. Unmarked vans. Flatbed trucks. Looking out his own window, the writer Nick Turse saw what I saw and more. Special Forces brandishing automatic rifles. Rolls of orange plastic netting. Dragnets. Pre-emptive arrests of peaceful protesters. Cages for detainees. And he caught sight of what he calls "the ultimate blending of corporatism and the police state — the Fuji blimp — now emblazoned with a second logo: NYPD." A spy-in-the sky, outfitted "with the latest in video-surveillance equipment, loaned free of charge to the police all week long."