September 11, 2001 is slowly fading from current event into history. The wound of the moment seems to be scabbing over. Our reaction to the injury, unfortunately, seems to have become more of a chronic condition.
I, like most others who lived through it, remember that day fairly well. I remember being in the office when one of the staff members came in talking about it. So, we were all paying attention when the second one hit. Not much work got done that day. I recall refreshing various news sites on my web browser frequently. Personally, I got a lot of my information via the people on a bulletin board system called The Well. I also recall getting some insight into which cable channels were owned by the same company – since everyone was playing news feeds. Before that, for example, I’m not sure I had appreciated that MTV was aligned with CBS through Viacom. In retrospect, a lot of my 9/11 experience was through the media. And on that day, I think the major media did us a service. A lot of people were credits to their professions and humanity generally that day.
It was the reaction that mostly got us in trouble. I think we were all in something of an altered mental state following the attacks to one degree or another. I’m not a weepy sort of fellow, in general, but I remember crying a little bit on the drive home from work. The enormity of the day got to me, I guess. After awhile, though, I think the pressure to continue covering the story made the media a little stupid. And the pressure to “do something” made our politicians a little stupid. The terrorists had very little power over us that we weren’t willing to give them. Knocking down a few planes and killing, sad as it was, a relative handful of people was at the far reaches of their power to directly affect us. The rest was power we gave them through our reaction.
They were able to scare us and make us angry and afraid. Staying angry and afraid was something we chose to do. Saddling ourselves with war debt and casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan were also choices. Things like Gitmo and the PATRIOT act were self-inflicted. Unlike, say, Germany or Japan in the 30s and 40s, al Qaeda lacked anything like the resources to impose its will directly on a significant portion of the population of any industrialized country, let alone ours. Rather, it had to do a bit of geopolitical judo, using our energy against ourselves. And they certainly got into our heads. For awhile it was wall-to-wall 9/11 this and 9/11 that. Politicians reflexively supported anything that could be framed as anti-terrorist and cowered away from anything that could be framed as pro-terrorist. Civil liberties took a back seat. War spending got a blank check.
We just ended one phase of our involvement in Iraq, but I’m sure our people (keeping with the conventional tradition of ignoring the effect on the Iraqis themselves) will keep dying there and, while our schools wheeze along and our infrastructure decays, we will continue spending gobs of money on Iraq-inflicted debt. We’re still going on in Afghanistan, with the goal being somewhat opaque, as far as I can tell. I supported the U.S. going into Afghanistan, but in retrospect even if it was better justified than Iraq, I’m not sure how useful the whole enterprise was.
Comparing the country today to the country ten years ago in 2000, pre-9/11/01, I don’t think the state of the nation has improved any. So, we’ve either stagnated or taken a step back. I can’t say that was all the work of the terrorists; we’re dealing with a lot of problems with roots that extend back a long way – e.g. the loss of manufacturing as the world catches up to the head start we got in the wake of World War II; our decisions during the 80s and 90s to engage in some profit taking of the wealth built up in the country during the 50s-70s. But our response to 9/11 acted as a force multiplier for those underlying problems. Now it feels like we’re in a hole, and it’s not clear whether we are digging out or digging deeper. Certainly I’ll be interested to see what things look like in another ten years.
Some cheery thoughts on this rainy Saturday morning; quite a contrast from the perfect weather the morning of 9/11/01 that was horribly interrupted by the planes striking.
While in the scheme of things, the building itself is minor, I find it to be representative of the general state of the country compared to generations past.
To me, it was a fairly simple thing to rebuild the towers, one floor taller. Dedicate that floor to the victims, showing our resolve to not buckle to terrorism.
Instead, 9 years later, we don’t even have a foundation in place.
Compare that to other things:
Sending a man to the moon: 8 years
Hoover Dam: 5 years
Empire State Building: 1.5 years
Golden Gate Bridge: 4.5 years
Mt. Rushmore: 14 years
There is a whole list of reasons of why we have not made more progress on the new WTC building, and I’m not pointing fingers at any one group.
To me, the fact that we can’t solve this problem is a symptom of a larger problem. Other examples would be how we seem to be on a sprint to national bankruptcy and can’t seem to make any progress with health care.
Again, with those issues, it is easy to form a blame circle, but we’re all guilty in one form or another. I just don’t have any idea hot to fix the core issue, and I have not heard anyone that does.
On top of all that, I’m 33. I’m not some older guy complaining how kids these days don’t get it. This is MY generation, and to me, we’re doing a shitty job running the world. I guess our only shining moment is that our wars have been far less deadly than wars past.
Jeez, kids today!
Leaving aside the $237 billion* of your inheritance spent staging a Moon landing, ** inventing Tang™ †, and generally giving the rubes something to gawk at while we moved the Cold War to space ‡, Mt. Rushmore? Really? A monument to the kitsch tastes and megalomania of its Klansman designer, carved Great White Father thumb-in-eyeball style into sacred Lakota lands we confiscated when we heard there might be some silver in it, whose Federal funding was secured after the local Chamber of Commerce let Calvin Coolidge think he’d caught the trout they’d surreptitiously placed on his hooks? That Mt. Rushmore? The one that isn’t even finished yet, assuming there’s anybody still out there who cares? Sheesh, too bad the thing didn’t take 1400 years, beginning with the clean-up after Gutzon Borglum plunged 5000 ft.
By the way, Jason, enjoy the next 25 years, after which you’ll be the guy complaining about dumbass children, as I am now, as my father was before me, and Booth Tarkington before him, and we’ll all be right. And you will, almost simultaneously, recognize that being right has nothing to do with it, since there’s somebody out there assuring everyone you’re just some out-of-touch geezer with a bad case of the crotchets.
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* up to the Moon landing; throw in finding a face on Mars and repairing Skylab and it’s $ half a trillion, adjusted to 2009 dollars, and exceeded only by WWII and the cost of bailing out various Republican laissez-faire regulatory scams.
** joke
† urban legend
‡ true
My point was less about the validity of those projects and more about setting out to take on a large challenge and completing it. I can’t think of anything we’re doing right now, or have done lately, that compares to those things.