My brother woke me up that morning; he told me there was a cool movie on TV where America was under attack. He was joking. At first he had thought it was a movie, but then it kept on going. My first thought was is this a revolution? My first emotion was satisfaction -- something about seeing America brought to her knees. To see such a smug and powerful entity so weak and vulnerable was strangely refreshing.

My sentiments may outrage you. That’s understandable. Keep in mind I’m from a generation of violent video games and frequent news feeds of people dying all over the world. What was special about this case? It was the destruction of particular American symbols that was satisfying, not the deaths of those involved. That part was sad. But surely, my disassociative powers were strong.

My friends came home from school. I had played hooky. They joked and told me that everyone was suspicious at school that I wasn’t there. We sat and talked about what had just happened. I told them I thought two things were going to be a consequence of this: we would go to war and we were going to lose some rights.

The next day, I took the train downtown to meet with this group that was organizing protests against the WTO. Overnight, they became a peace group. My friend Nasri pointed out how eerie it was that there were no planes in the sky. This was Chicago after all. O’Hare was the busiest airport in the world. He was afraid though; afraid of what the changes would mean for him. I ended up leaving this group.

I wasn’t an overnight patriot. That term, patriot, was funny. Suddenly patriot was a flag you had to wave regardless whether you were dissenting or agreeing just so people would listen to you. Patriots slapped flag stickers to their cars, threw bricks at mosques and said the pledge of allegiance every morning. I wouldn’t tell myself I stood by those kinds of people, but I was fooled. I had thought I was different from the sheeple because I thought about things. I was rational.

You see, there is a difference between terrorism and collateral damage -- at least, I believed there was. One isn’t deliberately targeting innocent civilians to push an agenda. Ok, that’s the distinction. It’s even a principled distinction! Surely, there’s got to be some principle somewhere that says it’s wrong to target innocent civilians. Now we have good guys and bad guys.

But even if this distinction is principled, is it a good one? Do we want to have this distinction? What purpose does it serve? What values does it purport to support? Presumably, if we make these sort of distinctions, less innocent people would die. We might think, that if we’re really interested in making this distinction, then we would be appalled if it was used as a justification for killing more innocent people.

I suppose it’s an occupational hazard for us would-be lawyers. We grow up being good with logic and rationalize often. We’re reinforced to do it by our teachers and sometimes our parents. Rationalizing helps give shape to the chaos of the world. It can explain that which we do not actually have the explanation for.

A side-effect of all this is that we become sort of platonic. At least, that’s the best way I can describe what I’ve been seeing. I don’t want to over-generalize, but I have noticed a trend. We practice distinguishing cases from other cases, principles from other principles, without any real thought as to why and what happens when we do. It’s as if logic is self-executing -- some sort of underlying order in which behavior guides itself from.

Yes, this is an example of what happens to people who undertake intensive repetitive training, mental or physical, without balancing off against the tendency to develop obsessional patterning. It's also something that has been noticed about one kind of lawyer present in all developed legal systems. Legal formalism is a syndrome of intellectual behaviors with many causes, just as legal realism is. It also has many effects, some of which are more troublesome than others.

Of course that’s bullshit. Just watch people and you’ll see otherwise -- although you may miss it if your gaze doesn’t leave the bubble we’re in.

In conclusion, if you need a conclusion, reread starting from line one.

I think this is a pretty successful essay, on its own terms. It could use a stiff rewrite, to smooth off rough edges and to reinforce your admirable tendencies towards simplicity and restraint. You could hide the ball just a trifle less, too.