9/11 was one of those once-a-generation moments that freezes time. Like Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination, anyone old enough to remember can tell you exactly where he was and what he was doing.
Seven years ago my then-girlfriend and I were getting ready for a rare day off together. That's when we got a phone call from her Mom: Turn your TV on.
CNN showed live footage of the World Trade Center, with a yawning smoking hole punched in one of the towers. Too big, I thought, for a wayward Cessna. I was pondering this when a second plane slammed into the other tower.
"We're at war," I told the girlfriend once I got over the shock of what I'd just seen. "Two times is no accident."
Forget the day off. Rather than taking some day trip, we stayed glued to the television until after midnight. It isn't every day you see the wheels come off the whole world. We followed the news dispatches -- some erroneous, some not, and commented on them. A plane hit the Pentagon. Another bound for what?The Capitol building?The White House? Another plane down in some Pennsylvania field, no survivors. Other planes still up in the air and no one knows anything. The President crisscrossing the country. A very stressful time.
In the seven years since then, America has changed. Not for the better, either. I find it hard to recognize the place. Life has changed, too, and not necessarily for the better.
We are currently mired in two wars. One, in Afghanistan, was declared days after the 9/11 bombings. Now, that action was justified. I'd said it then and say it today. You can't let such mass carnage as New York and D.C. go unanswered. You are perfectly within your rights to go whip some tail -- in fact, if you don't respond, there's something seriously wrong with you.
Iraq, though, is another story. That had nothing to do with 9/11; even the governmental hearings and final report had to really stretch some imaginations to forge any link between Iraq and 9/11. True, Saddam Hussein was a monster who had no business living, let alone governing. You can say the same about most of the dictators and generalissimos all over the globe. If it wasn't for the fact we didn't complete the job in the 1991 Gulf War (and if not for our massive oil addiction), Hussein might have been just some other tinhorn dictator we hear about every once in a while.
But wars and rumors of wars are merely peripheral. The biggest threat to the American way of life is from within, not without. Terrorists don't have to worry about scaring the spit out of us or messing us up, as we're doing a fine job of that ourselves.
Things like extra scrutiny before boarding a plane, showing identification a few extra times, additional police powers here and there, and jumping through more hoops when entering a federal building are more or less accepted now. Are we any more secure than we were eight years ago, despite all these post-9/11 measures? The public perception says no.
Strange things happened when the World Trade Ceter became Ground Zero and the Pentagon a target. The girlfriend and I took a short break from CNN to go outside, and though the streets were quiet a lot of flags were out. They stayed out for months as people showed a) their patriotism or b) their ability to follow the crowd. I have never seen this much flag-waving before or since. A good thing? Maybe. While it was great to see folks pulling together like that, what wasn't so great was the accompanying hysteria.
Americans started looking to their government for answers and got that great Constitution-weakening travesty called USA PATRIOT Act instead. Even the name kills me; it implies that if you weren't for it obviously you were not a patriot. It's certain the Founding Fathers would scream out their opposition to such rationale. But the American people take their freedoms for granted, and have proven again and again that they would gladly trade them for peace and safety. Of course, as it was suggested (I think by Ben Franklin, but I could be wrong), the end result of such a trade is fewer rights, and no peace or safety.
None of this is unprecedented. Years ago, ex-President Harry Truman sat down with writer Merle Miller and gave his opinion on just about every subject under the sun. The resulting book, "Plain Speaking," has a chapter on hysteria in American history. Things like the Alien and Sedition Acts (during the time of John Adams), the Know-Nothings (an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant political party), and Red scares through the 20th Century were, Truman said, some of our moments in history when folks were so frightened they took leave of their senses. (If you can find the book, I highly recommend it.)
Ol' Harry S. would have a lot to say of post-9/11 America if he was alive to see it. So too would the founding fathers. They might not recognize the place either.
Seven years ago my then-girlfriend and I were getting ready for a rare day off together. That's when we got a phone call from her Mom: Turn your TV on.
CNN showed live footage of the World Trade Center, with a yawning smoking hole punched in one of the towers. Too big, I thought, for a wayward Cessna. I was pondering this when a second plane slammed into the other tower.
"We're at war," I told the girlfriend once I got over the shock of what I'd just seen. "Two times is no accident."
Forget the day off. Rather than taking some day trip, we stayed glued to the television until after midnight. It isn't every day you see the wheels come off the whole world. We followed the news dispatches -- some erroneous, some not, and commented on them. A plane hit the Pentagon. Another bound for what?The Capitol building?The White House? Another plane down in some Pennsylvania field, no survivors. Other planes still up in the air and no one knows anything. The President crisscrossing the country. A very stressful time.
In the seven years since then, America has changed. Not for the better, either. I find it hard to recognize the place. Life has changed, too, and not necessarily for the better.
We are currently mired in two wars. One, in Afghanistan, was declared days after the 9/11 bombings. Now, that action was justified. I'd said it then and say it today. You can't let such mass carnage as New York and D.C. go unanswered. You are perfectly within your rights to go whip some tail -- in fact, if you don't respond, there's something seriously wrong with you.
Iraq, though, is another story. That had nothing to do with 9/11; even the governmental hearings and final report had to really stretch some imaginations to forge any link between Iraq and 9/11. True, Saddam Hussein was a monster who had no business living, let alone governing. You can say the same about most of the dictators and generalissimos all over the globe. If it wasn't for the fact we didn't complete the job in the 1991 Gulf War (and if not for our massive oil addiction), Hussein might have been just some other tinhorn dictator we hear about every once in a while.
But wars and rumors of wars are merely peripheral. The biggest threat to the American way of life is from within, not without. Terrorists don't have to worry about scaring the spit out of us or messing us up, as we're doing a fine job of that ourselves.
Things like extra scrutiny before boarding a plane, showing identification a few extra times, additional police powers here and there, and jumping through more hoops when entering a federal building are more or less accepted now. Are we any more secure than we were eight years ago, despite all these post-9/11 measures? The public perception says no.
Strange things happened when the World Trade Ceter became Ground Zero and the Pentagon a target. The girlfriend and I took a short break from CNN to go outside, and though the streets were quiet a lot of flags were out. They stayed out for months as people showed a) their patriotism or b) their ability to follow the crowd. I have never seen this much flag-waving before or since. A good thing? Maybe. While it was great to see folks pulling together like that, what wasn't so great was the accompanying hysteria.
Americans started looking to their government for answers and got that great Constitution-weakening travesty called USA PATRIOT Act instead. Even the name kills me; it implies that if you weren't for it obviously you were not a patriot. It's certain the Founding Fathers would scream out their opposition to such rationale. But the American people take their freedoms for granted, and have proven again and again that they would gladly trade them for peace and safety. Of course, as it was suggested (I think by Ben Franklin, but I could be wrong), the end result of such a trade is fewer rights, and no peace or safety.
None of this is unprecedented. Years ago, ex-President Harry Truman sat down with writer Merle Miller and gave his opinion on just about every subject under the sun. The resulting book, "Plain Speaking," has a chapter on hysteria in American history. Things like the Alien and Sedition Acts (during the time of John Adams), the Know-Nothings (an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant political party), and Red scares through the 20th Century were, Truman said, some of our moments in history when folks were so frightened they took leave of their senses. (If you can find the book, I highly recommend it.)
Ol' Harry S. would have a lot to say of post-9/11 America if he was alive to see it. So too would the founding fathers. They might not recognize the place either.
No comments:
Post a Comment