A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

With our cultural fixation on numerology, it seems especially obligatory to comment on the anniversary of 9/11 because it is the tenth.

I was every bit as shaken by the event as everyone else; struck by the juxtaposition of gratuitous destruction and peaceful cool, blue fall skies of that morning. After that, there was the chaotic nature in which information flowed in. The Internet was a little different then than it is today; not quite as opaque as it was in, say, 1995; but you still had to know where to go for quick information. I got a lot of my information from The Well; a bulletin board system of sorts with a lot of reliable posters from all around the country, primarily on the coasts.

The drive home was a little surreal. I confess I cried a little bit. I forget what all moved me that much – probably, it wasn’t the death of strangers. I’ve seen that on any number of news reports over the years and read about even greater numbers of deaths in history books without feeling the least bit emotionally involved. I think it was more a sense that things in this country were bound to change for the worse. But, I don’t know how much of that sense is actual memory and how much of that is memory colored by the fact that things did change for the worse. Aside from getting emotional, the rest of what I recall from the drive home was that the roads were pretty quiet — but, that’s not unusual in the back country roads from Lafayette to Monticello — and, before I got out of Lafayette, the Family Express on North 9th Street had jacked up its prices in response to the attacks.

When I got home, I was given a lesson in media consolidation. Every channel had coverage of the attacks; and, each channel would use the feed from its parent company’s news division. So, I found out that MTV and CBS were tied together, for example. Up and down the channel list, you would probably get one of five or six news broadcasts.

Shortly after the attacks, I also remember being uneasy about the number of people on the news programs saying some variant of “everything changed” on 9/11. Or, maybe, “irony died” on 9/11. Kind of weird stuff from, I suspected, people who wanted irony to die or everything to change and were projecting their desires on the event. But, aside from that, there was this incredible unity. I remember having hopes that we, as a country, would use the event to get behind something god almighty big and make our generation memorable. I don’t think I had anything specific in mind; but something on the scale of the moon landing was probably bouncing around in there.

I recall being extremely touched by the gift of 14 cattle by Kenyan Maasai herders. More than anything, that demonstrated that the World was almost entirely on our side following those attacks. I also recall being moved by Jon Stewart’s speech when the Daily Show came back on the air. We were starting to shake off the stunned reaction.

It’s hard telling what, if anything, might have been possible with Americans unified and the World in our corner; but I think it’s fair to say that we squandered the moment. We all wanted vengeance; but the just thing to do isn’t always the smart thing to do. In the end, our response to 9/11 hurt us far worse than the event itself did or than al Qaeda had the power to. Pearl Harbor represented the tip of Imperial Japan’s spear. 9/11 was al Qaeda going all-in and sucker punching us.

I supported the invasion of Afghanistan; though, in retrospect, that might not have been the height of wisdom. We’re still there. We wouldn’t be the first empire that went to Afghanistan to die. But, it was Iraq that was the height of monstrous stupidity. Without 9/11, you couldn’t sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people.

So, here we are, ten years later; economically spent and lacking optimism. It’s hard to remember how things were prior to 9/11. During the late 90s, the Internet boom made us feel like we were creating something phenomenal. Energy was high. Jobs were easy to come by. Infrastructure was not crumbling.

We can’t blame 9/11 for everything, of course. The dotcom buble was bursting; the housing bubble was still inflating, but the trajectory was pretty well set. Wall Street was stacking its house of cards higher and higher. Our industrial base was already being hollowed out. But, it seems to me, our reaction to 9/11 was a force multiplier. We increased our expenses enormously without bothering to budget for them. Government credibility, not at a high water mark anyway, was demolished. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “War on Terra” became punchlines.

It’s entirely appropriate that we honor the first responders of 9/11 as brave and regard the deaths of the folks in the Pentagon and World Trade center as tragic. But, for me, the nobility of the people who acted that day and the solemnity of the occasion is tainted by all that followed.

The Midwesterner has a blog post worth reading on the subject of state job growth experiments.

A couple of notes:

#States may well be too small to fight against the global current within their own borders. Regionalism may be the way to go. Otherwise, they’re mired in the zero-sum game and downward spiral of poaching existing companies from one another.

#Colorado’s “economic gardening” experiment may have merit — try to nurture start ups and hope they grow into something bigger. Throwing money at big companies, hoping they’ll stick around doesn’t seem to be working and these big companies probably aren’t going to grow domestically anyway.

#Most experiments are worth trying; if only because the alternative is giving up which some States (he picks on Florida) seem to be doing already.

Maybe I’m too hard on the state folks because I see the hard work the local folks do; but it’s hard to escape the feeling that state legislators would prefer to get credit for cutting taxes and balancing their budget while making the local folks do the hard stuff; like cutting services or raising taxes locally to provide services mandated by the state or expected by constituents.

College tuition increase hearings by the state budget committee are another round in this. Seth Slabaugh, writing for the Muncie Star Press, has an article on Ball State’s President Jo Ann Gora pushing back a little bit against the state.

“Tuition is going up because the state’s share of the cost is going down, and in Ball State’s case it has gone down dramatically,” Gora said. “The point we’re trying to make here, and it may be the most important point that we make, is that tuition is not going up because our spending is out of control.”

We saw similar accusations when the State was balancing its budget on the backs of local government. Rather than acknowledge that fact, state lawmakers would accuse local government of being out of control with its spending.

Parents trying to send kids to college absolutely don’t want to hear that they have to pay more in tuition because State government has other priorities. State lawmakers likely don’t want their constituent parents to hear that either. So, they hold these hearings to hold college administrators’ feet to the fire a little bit. Probably nothing wrong with that, in and of itself; but we shouldn’t believe that state lawmakers aren’t contributing in a relatively direct way to these tuition increases.

Former Representative Tom Kromkowski has passed away. From the South Bend Tribune:

Tom Kromkowski, a Democrat who served 26 years in the Statehouse representing District 7, passed away about 5 a.m. today at Lakeland Hospital in Niles, his daughter Julie McSweeney of Atlanta said. He had celebrated his 69th birthday Sept. 2.

Doctors admitted Kromkowski to the hospital late Thursday night, McSweeney said. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer several years ago.

She describes her father, who first headed to Indianapolis to represent South Bend in 1980, as a man who loved politics.