Eight years on, 9/11 still matters
There’s a museum, there will be solemn ceremonies … but eight years to the day after the terror attacks in Washington, New York and Pennsylvania, September 11 is perhaps most significant for the way it fundamentally changed this country. After the attacks, this nation lurched from freedom ts fear; as millions of frightened Americans dropped their rugged individualism in favor or acceptance of almost anything government wanted to do: from domestic surveillance to indefinite detention of American citizens, to war and even torture. In many ways, 9/11 officially canceled the 90s — the dot com “boom” era, when all things seemed possible.
It’s almost unbelievable when you look back at it, and at how fundamentally things changed, including in the media, which for years became completely timid, compliant and worshipful of the president. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the American system had resilience built into it from its founding, and even as many Americans remained paralyzed by fear, the majority snapped out of it, and eventually began to roll back the excesses of the Bush administration (though not yet all of them.) Eight years on, America no longer has a “unitary executive.” Getting rid of other intrusions on our civil liberties, including the Orwellian USA PATRIOT Act (parts of which are supposed to expire this year) will take longer. And this country has yet to put other creepy outgrowths of 9/11 behind us, including the lingering war in Iraq, and the torture program that while ended, still cries out for accountability. But we are making progress. The bad news is that eight years removed from that day, America has lurched from obeisance to the other extreme. We’re seeing a level of nastiness and incivility that makes the Clinton era look tame. I doubt that it’s a majority, but the crazies out there are vocal, suggestible, and in some cases, downright threatening. We still don’t know where Osama bin Laden is, though we were promised that we’d get him “dead or alive.”
So on 9/11, I’m not looking to recapture the unity the country felt on that day. Frankly, I don’t think we can, or should. Too many excesses happen when a government faces a too-pliant populace. I look cynically upon the Glenn Becks of the world, whose “9/12 Project” purports to be about getting back to that unifying mood. His followers would never unify behind this particular president. Instead, Beck and his crowd want to twist the lesson of 9/11 into a crusade against the president. Pretty cynical, coming from a guy who announced on his radio show that he hates the 9/11 families… Instead, I’m just hoping that Americans remember the lessons, acknowledge the pain and shock of that day, honor the troops fighting the war in Afghanistan, which grew directly out of 9/11, and in Iraq, which was shoe-horned into it, as well as the policemen and firefighters who lost their lives, heroically, on that day. And we should acknowledge the attacks’ lingering effects on the victims’ families, and on all of us. It was one awful, awful, unforgettable day.
Meanwhile, the wingnuts are outraged that President Obama would “co-opt” 9/11 for something as un-American as “service.” Better to use the day to reindoctrinate every American into already-discarded neoconservatism:
Writing last month in The American Spectator, a conservative political magazine, columnist Matthew Vandum bemoaned attempts to change 9/11 “from a day of reflection and remembrance to a day of activism, food banks and community gardens.”
Laura Ingraham, guest-hosting on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor, said “a smattering of left-wing groups is trying to co-opt 9/11 and make it their day.” Focusing on service, she complained, “blurs the importance of what happened.” Instead, the day should be used to educate young people “on the threats to freedom and liberty … by Islamic jihadists.”
And as usual, they’re pretty much along on that one:
The service day’s founders and many relatives of those who died on 9/11 reject the accusations.
“This isn’t a liberal idea or a conservative idea, a Republican idea or a Democratic idea. It’s a human idea,” Paine says. “The conservative community wound up doing what they accused the Obama administration of doing, which was to use 9/11 to score political points. ”
Nikki Stern, who lost her husband at the Trade Center, says she likes the emphasis on service: “I don’t want my husband’s death to justify an eternal armed-guard mentality. The day is more about the spirit that impelled Jay’s brother to run into that building.”
Amen. What lingers from that terrible day, for those not obsessed with Islam, was the heroism of firefighters who rushed into the smoldering buildings and up those endless flights of stairs, to try and bring people out, in many cases not coming out themselves; the selflessness of New Yorkers, and of Pentagon employees, who rushed to help others — the numerous stories of people who saved others, or who tried … the way Americans were willing to do whatever it took to help a family touched by the tragedy, from offering scholarships to the children, or the Wall Street titan who kept paying the salaries of his hundreds of lost employees so their widows could keep going. All around the world, people declared themselves ready to help — ready to serve — and help America heal. 9/11 WAS about service (and what a tragedy that that George W. Bush missed the opportunity to call upon the nation to serve…) The “jihadis” are dead, and their ideas are dead. Why devote this day to them, when you can devote it to the largeness, and greatness of individual people on that day?
Related: CNN coverage of the morning of 9/11:
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