Ten Years After

One of the more unpleasant truths about America after the events of September 11, 2001 is that we haven't changed for the better.  If anything, we've become more superficial and bellicose in the past ten years.  On September 12, 2001, I thought we Americans would be more intelligent and sensitive in our approach to the rest of the world and each other, and that we would be more united and more purposeful in how we lived or our lives.  Nothing could have prepared me for how wrong I was. 

I thought we'd rediscover a sense of community in out towns and cities and reach out to one another, but we became more cut off from each other.  9/11 actually drove more people into their own little worlds; we retreated into our houses and bought home theaters to take the place of concerts and movie theaters.  I expected people to make the connection between terrorism and foreign oil, and how money to purchase Middle Eastern oil found its way to supporting terrorist activities - not all of it, but enough to give us pause.  But instead of becoming more energy-efficient and less dependent on foreign oil, we bought more SUVs and almost let Amtrak go bankrupt.  We certainly can't persuade Republican governors to build rail transit projects in their states, and President Obama pays so much lip service to "green jobs" that it's become a national joke. 

I thought our culture would become more meaningful and less tawdry.  How could reality shows prosper after the reality of 9/11 on our TV screens? But our culture got much sillier and a whole lot meaner.  One Hollywood producer said that action movies would always remain popular due to demand for them in a global, multilingual audience - because everyone understands the international language of "BOOM!"

I suddenly developed a greater appreciation for mime when I heard that.

Even worse, Americans failed to learn the reality of how the world works.  We constructed, on a planet full of tragedy and loss, a civilization designed to confute and deny such realities.  The peoples of Europe, who endured one war after another and found its values comprised and tested so much for so long, certainly understand this reality, and their cultural assumptions - that life is full of tragedy that must be dealt with - contradict the blind optimism of Americans.  With the worst terrorist attack ever brought to our shores, I found it hard to understand why America was not able to start over with a better understanding of civilization in the same way Western European countries understand it.

Perhaps the worst outcome after 9/11 was how President George Walker Bush took the opportunity offered by the attacks to pursue a unilateral militaristic foreign policy.  Journalist Jonathan Alter touched on this point in remarks at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in his adopted hometown of Montclair, New Jersey, where he lamented how Bush failed to appeal to our sense of patriotism and ask us to sacrifice.  Alter noted the failure of Americans to lessen our dependence of Middle Eastern oil, to be sure, but he went further than that in pointing out how we ended up going to war in Iraq.  "We went to war under false pretenses against a country that had no connection to the attacks against us," Alter said. "We allowed fear to be exploited for political purposes and too often put our put our deepest values in deep storage. We failed to tap the idealism unleashed across the country to launch an era of national service."

Indeed, on September 22, 2001, Bush told us to go shopping.  He exhorted us to fly (not take the train) to Disney World (in the state where his brother was governor), essentially asking us to live in a September 10 world and continue propping up our consumerist society.  And how were we to deal with "the folks" (as Bush referred to al-Qaeda on the day of the attack) who committed these acts of terrorism? Bush more or less told us to let the experts handle it. We were given freedom to go about our business, even as the government cracked down on our civil liberties.

So when Bush carefully insinuated that Saddam Hussein was a threat without explicitly saying Saddam was or might have been involved with 9/11 (he let people think Saddam was), he got the country to back him into going to war in Iraq in March 2003 and tick off a planet that had been on our side eighteen months earlier.  Those of us who opposed invading Iraq were met with the following question from those who thought Iraq was involved with al-Qaeda and 9/11: "Have you forgotten what happened to our country?"

"No," I wanted to reply at the time. "Have you?" :-(

On September 13, 2011, we're too divided to solve any problems, be it the economy or the ongoing wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  We can't even provide relief money to victims of Hurricane Irene because Senate Republicans complain how costly it is.  The division in this country was created from exploitation of our unity on September 13, 2001, and that is George Walker Bush's worst legacy.