9/11 and the country we lost

The essay ends with the question: Did we see our true selves on September 11, 2001 -- a day that, well, will live in infamy? Or do we see our true selves today, September 11, 2008 -- a day like any other?

I submit neither, Rod. It woke us up and we remembered something for a while. Our true selves ARE who we are. We were our true selves on 9-10, 9-11, and 9-12, and are on 9-11-08.

We remembered for a while, just a little while, that blood bought our peace and prosperity, fighting for very old fashioned ideas.

Then we forgot them. Even you turned your back on them, eventually, being uncomfortable with holding against the "tide" of the cynics, even you abandoned faith in spreading light against the darkness of tyranny, and justified it with political balm.

I, however, will not go quietly into that night. I will rail endlessly against it. No matter how mad it makes people, or how they mock. Conscience can let me do no other. Not even if I am the last man on earth to speak for it, you will have to still the air with force. My will and belief is NEVER surrendering.

We saw our potential, our idealized selves, seven years ago. Yesterday, today and tomorrow those selves wait in the shadows until they are again needed.

For all of our flaws, our weaknesses, our pettiness and our ignorance, it remains a worthy source of pride in our culture.

I don't know how someone who can write something like that, can write a few days earlier that he's "locked and loaded" for the reignited culture wars.

You're damn frustraing, Rod.

What we saw that day was something closer to reality than we are used to seeing. The tenuousness of life, the stunning beauty of the morning, man's terrifying capacity to use his wounded pride for evil. We were shocked because our souls are darkened and we sleepwalk. When Christ returns we will be overwhelmed by the light and the truth it reveals about ourselves and the cosmos.

"Did we see our true selves on September 11, 2001 -- a day that, well, will live in infamy? Or do we see our true selves today, September 11, 2008 -- a day like any other?"

Both. 9/11 woke us up. We realized that there were people that didn't like us and wanted to harm us. So we overreacted. And now those that finally see the overreaction want to move on.

imo if we don't heal from 9/11 the terrorists won. We need to honor the memory of those that died but still go about our lives.

Ben: Truth. Thanks.

Apparently I was wrong . . .

For better or worse, I think you were.

I think the feeling of unity in the wake of 9/11 was, for the most part, an illusion. I think many of us felt really connected to each other only because it hadn't yet become apparent how deeply divided we were, but that started to become apparent once we started talking about where we as a country needed to go from here. To some people, it was an obvious sign that we needed to engage more deeply with the world, look more critically at our own foreign policy and our dependence on oil, start finding ways to build more bridges with the Islamic world, etc. To others it was pretty much exactly the opposite: a sign that our country was under siege by hostile forces, and we needed to rally around the flag, saddle up and go kick some ass.

I think that, to both sides, the preferred course of action seemed so obvious and so necessary that they assumed that the rest of the country was on the same page as them, and we were all united, but as soon as it came time to actually act, the scope of the differences started to be exposed. Totally different sets of priorities came out once the immediate disaster response died down, totally different worldviews, etc.

The most difficult part was that each side basically blamed the other's approach for having gotten us into the situation - our foreign policy was either thought to be too wussy (seen as a sign of weakness that invited an attack) or too belligerent (seen as the source of anger which provoked 9/11 as a retaliation), and so of course each side wanted to go further in the direction the other side blamed for the problem...

It started pretty early. I remember Friday, 9/14, sitting in a car with some friends listening to news reports on the radio, when a friend said "OK, is anyone but me starting to get creeped out by all the flag-waving stuff?" and there was just this huge sigh of relief as everyone started talking about how they thought they were the only one, how they were terrified of some of the things they were hearing people say, etc. People expressed disbelief that the rest of the country didn't seem to have any understanding of the Islamic world, foreign policy issues like Palestine, etc, and were surprised that so many people were SO surprised. Everyone was worried that our country's reaction was going to make things worse, and everyone was starting to feel really alienated from the rest of the country. By the time the Iraq War hit, and then started going badly, the degree of difference was totally apparent.

What the 9/11 experience tells us, though, is that people are capable of deep and immediate empathy for people unlike themselves, and that a lot of people still want a sense of connection with the rest of America, or at least they did then.

For the most part, though, I think the past seven years are definitive proof that more divides us than unites us.

I was being sarcastic and now I feel like a jerk. Apologies to all.

Watcher, would you then have us topple the tyrannies that are friendly to us, namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia? It might help us get better short term control over Saudi oil, but I doubt it would lead to an outcome in which the Saudis and Egyptians gain the political liberties we often take for granted. It might sound like a cliche, but fighting evil always carries with it the risk of becoming oneself evil, of doing evil in order to defeat evil, of destroying villages in order to save them.

I heard something interesting from the Talmud recently, that there is the danger of sinning by being impatient, because it reflects the desire to do something on our time, instead of recognizing that events ultimately transpire according to God's time, and God's will. The person who quoted this to me was underscoring that we do no favors to peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians by taking a rosy, optimistic view of Hamas.

Also, remember that Pope John Paul II realized that a military approach to overthrowing Soviet tyranny would have appalling human consequences, and that he undertook a more patient route, one which was vigilant about avoiding catastrophe while pursuing freedom. We do need to address the souls of our enemies - the Soviets, after all, did not act like cornered beasts in giving up their empire. They felt that they had the breathing space to leave their satellites behind peacefully through negotiation. They would have acted very differently, most likely monstrously, if the West had taken the stance of never negotiating with tyrannies.

Watcher, would you then have us topple the tyrannies that are friendly to us, namely Egypt and Saudi Arabia? It might help us get better short term control over Saudi oil, but I doubt it would lead to an outcome in which the Saudis and Egyptians gain the political liberties we often take for granted. It might sound like a cliche, but fighting evil always carries with it the risk of becoming oneself evil, of doing evil in order to defeat evil, of destroying villages in order to save them.

You know, I get really tired of your endless insults. Your question presupposes a mindless zealotry that is neither wise or prudent.

I am unable to comprehend a mindset that assumes that a dedication to freedom, including one that uses force, is going to simply run around the globe toppling nation after nation. Given that, I have no idea how to respond to your insult in any way that's not going to appear to just be flinging insults back at you.

Perhaps you live by a code of simplistic rules or policies. Perhaps you actually live in the cartoonish image I occaisionally get from people who live by PC rules, who have simplistic rules and bumper-sticker style principles, and run around shouting "give peace a chance" when we're taking down one of the most violent and powerful tyrants of the last century. Our actions were the embodiement of "give peace a chance", but not in the simplistic and emotionally bereft-of-thought knee jerk reactionism to our actions in Iraq.

Perhaps it is the endless antagonism the present left has toward the concept of "judgement" - defined as thoughtfully and dispassionately weighing the merits of, and the possible outcomes of, change and disturbing the status quo, questions of deep importance, or seemingly impossible challenges - all in the light of a set of higher and better than ourselves principles.

My gut reaction to your question is "of course not, silly", which would have the obvious retort "so why do you have a policy of topping all tyrants if you don't mean to topple all tyrannical regimes?"

All simplistic and childish nonsense, of course.

A similar situation would be to "end all domestic violence". Yeah, I have that as a goal. Does this mean I intend to remove the children from all parents whom I do not trust?

No, it means we find every reasonable means of punishing, preventing, and stopping it when we can.

Thus, the statement of "we must be a force for ending tyranny, and spreading the light against the darkness of tyranny" is no simplistic thing. It is rather a principle. A balance beam, if you will, to weigh actions and lack of actions. If that decision does not advance this principle, then find one that does.

And not be afraid to use force when it can be done and have reasonable chance of a workable outcome.

I believed that the case in Iraq, all the signs pointed to it, and I still think that. Bush may be a mediocre president, but in my mind he has done a few extraordinarily brilliant and inspiring things. Iraq was one of them. The world owes him and our servants in uniform a huge debt of gratitude.

Sig, thanks for the poems.

Chris, I'm with you. Keep the faith. I'd say Hope, but, you know...

As usual, The Onion nailed it at the time; and really, it didn't take long for our great national longing to be re-fulfilled...

This is somewhat OT, but I don't know where else to post it, and I think it's worth remembering today (my apologies if someone has already mentioned it and I missed it):

September 11 is also the anniversary of the day in 1683 when Jan Sobieski and his army defeated the Turks outside the walls of Vienna. Along with Tours and Lepanto, this was one of the great Western military victories over the Muslims.

Who says being the city on the hill at the end of WWII did not get us anywhere? At the beginning of WWII, there were basically 3 "first world" democracies, us and England and Canada. Democracy was almost unheard of in third world countries (even lip service to democracy).

Hmmm. I'm not sure what I said that might have misled you about what I think or mean, but I'll try again.

I said we enjoyed great success during and after WWII (the successes you mention, such as Europe, Japan, etc) because of our determination and our strident belief in the higher angels of liberty, freedom, self-determination. We seem to agree on this.

However, when I mention that is not exactly the case since then, I refer to the Vietnam era till now. Whatever the motivation of JFK to enter that conflict, LBJ's unwillingness to win and to win for a moral and high cause, has resulted in the widespread loss of respect, and a deep cynicism about our commitment to freedom and self government.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the backwards momentum of civil rights and personal freedom in the Middle East is easily paralleled by our loss of commitment to winning to win for these noble ideas. Not that such decay was started in Vietnam, it started before Korea, it started at the conclusion of WWII, when we as a nation, war-weary, acceeded to the control of Eastern Europe under the tyrannical regime of an "enemy of our enemy is our friend" ally Stalin.

Not knowing the characters, and having only read some small inputs from Truman about that time, I can only observe what happened, and not why. But we can observe the results. An obvious lack of continued dedication to those things we fought so hard for just immediately prior to the conclusion of WWII, as the cold war and the 50's through the 70's passed put the lie to our resolve and our belief in the universality of the rights of mankind. We became complacent and "comfortable" with divvying up with the tyrants who got to be free and who did not.

We created the very cynicism that has fueled the anti-American sentiment that often pervades the third world when we failed to be ever-vigilant in defense of humanity.

Reagan's time was a bright spot in that gloom, as we simply gave a little nudge to the groaning USSR and it collapsed under its own weight. But then we did nothing. We allowed that vacuum, that hunger for justice and the higher angels of our moral beliefs to remain subject to expedience, and we denied them completely and repeatedly, as we failed to in any signficant matter attempt to promote them as a matter of national policy.

While Bush I gave lip service, Clinton actually and actively betrayed those ideals. Bush II committed us, and we nationally split over them, and apparently, the majority again, found expedience, convenience, and political expediency far more valuable than the humanity of anyone "not like us" around the globe,and invented many sophistries to explain and justify our lack of any moral foundational principles, or at least why we should not act on any of them.

The left, and the creeping onslaught of modern liberalism fueled the cynicism and charges of "imperialism" and "decadence" levelled at us by the likes of Bin Ladin, who observed that as a matter of official policy resulting in action, we were as seriously committed to our stated ideals as the Slickster was to chastity while in office.

The result, then, is not to further betray, by removing ourselves from any confrontation with tyranny, but to actually stand up for those things we believe and engage relentlessly, that ALONE is the only means by which faith in our country will see any restoration.

Seeing as how one political party, part of the other, and even supposedly seriously committed to right folks like Rod can't summon the courage to stand for ANY action, much less a dedicated long term campaign for them, the prognosis for the future is grim indeed.

On the other hand, the culture war might be won within our nation, and we can again, be an actual force for good, rather than a discredit to the notions we eloquently, but almost totally ignore, pay homage to in our founding documents.