The Wrongologist

Let’s take a break from What’s Wrong to reflect:

Our focus today is on the World Trade Center in New York, what we now call “Ground Zero”.

I had a personal connection to the WTC, having lived 2 blocks from it in the early ‘80s.  We were urban pioneers then, living and working in the Wall Street area, a part of town that did not have supermarkets; movies or many stores open after 5pm. Occasionally, we would have dinner at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the Towers. In fact, one kid had her sweet sixteen dinner there, with all of New York at her feet. At that point in my career, I visited the Towers often because I had friends and colleagues working there.  By 2001, it was my children that lived in the New York area and it is they who worked nearby and lost friends in the attack on the Towers.

On the weekend before Thanksgiving in 2001, my wife, two of our daughters and their husbands and I visited Ground Zero on a Sunday.  At that point, much of the twisted pile of steel and concrete that stood more than 10 stories high after the collapse of the buildings had been trucked away, but some of the superstructure remained standing like a skeleton, a grim reminder of what was. 

During our time at Ground Zero, we saw many firefighters in their dress blues visiting the site, usually with their families, looking on in silence.  They came from all over America, and I guess that we saw more than a hundred uniformed men and women that day.  I talked briefly with a group from a small town in California, who said they came simply to pay their respects to those who died.  They were not asking for insider tours, or visits with the mayor or other VIPs, they were just tourists looking on in disbelief, like thousands of the rest of us.

So, 10 years on, what does Ground Zero have to say to us?

9/11 did not change everything, but we acted as if it did. We learned to be afraid. We learned that we were vulnerable, that the most powerful nation can, under the wrong circumstances, be powerless to prevent tragedy and pain. We learned, for the first time for most of us, something about national shock, helplessness and above all, that there are limits to our ability to cope with disaster and to return to a normal existence.

We allowed ourselves to be swept up in the moment by that fear. Many, many people said that they didn’t care WHAT our government did, or how our civil rights were weakened, as long as we were kept safe from the terrorists. Well intentioned or not, the Bush administration exploited our fear and the outcome 10 years later, is two simultaneous wars in Muslim countries, a debilitation of our influence, our moral authority and most importantly, our belief in ourselves.

Could we have stood up to our fears? Sure. Our nation had the stuff to rally from the Civil War, the great fire in Chicago, the earthquake in San Francisco, Pearl Harbor, WWII, Vietnam. We might be a better nation today if in the past 10 years, we were willing to be uncomfortable, anxious, but tough-minded enough to say no to at least one tax cut and/or one war in the Middle East. Possibly, we would be a more secure nation today, not just physically but maybe, psychically. We might not see bogeymen under every turban. A proposed mosque near Ground Zero might not lead the national news for weeks.
 
And the domino theory of fear continues to divide us: Since 9/11, one tile of fear has fallen against the next and so on, while our politicians jockey for positions about the latest, greatest wedge issue: We are afraid of China; We fear that our budget deficits will spiral out of control, bankrupting the most powerful and largest economy on the planet; We fear for our kids safety if they walk to school; We fear the mob at the gates, driven by the likes of Glenn Beck, now Father Coughlin 2.0, railing constantly about them.

You could say that the dead guy won, but I don’t believe that. We have all the resources we need to remain the exceptional country we believe we are, except the will to work hard even when afraid about the outcome. We need to rebuild a shared vision of the future. We need to re-learn how to be uncomfortable and anxious in an ambiguous world without shutting down or being ineffectual. Lately when things get tough, we start to strut, have short attention spans , prefer form over substance and pray to god that it all works out… (OMG, have we all become George Bush?).  

Remember 9/11. Let us never forget the heroes and the victims. But let us never again sacrifice our freedoms or our common sense, to fear.