In my own case it’s a weird day to think about – I was in college at the time and didn’t have a TV, so we spent the day following things on the radio and it was only when I saw the papers the next morning that I really processed the fact that the towers were gone. I grew up seeing them from a hill we drove up on the way to church every Sunday, and so the picture of the city skyline without them was deeply unsettling. It wasn’t, however, until I went home a month or so later, and felt the terrible sadness all around me, that the horror of what had happened settled in – perhaps it was because I was just an oblivious college kid, but the mood around DC never seemed to have the same depth of anguish as the one back home in North Jersey. The flags, of course, were everywhere, as in many cases were the tears – I didn’t happen to know anyone who’d died, but among the people I talked to back home it often seemed that that made me the exception rather than the rule.
One way in which I was decidedly not exceptional was in the effects that that day had on me in the weeks and months that followed. I thought for a while about joining the armed forces, but that was about as noble as things got – on the whole the attacks were widely exploited as an excuse for a lot of anger and resentment, which in turn fed into a complete unwillingness to see the roles that our own actions, both at home and abroad, had played in making that terrible day a reality. And it was that sort of self-righteousness, the rallying around the “we” and constant demonization of the other, that enabled us to turn any and all questions about the rightness of our government’s actions and the nobility of the American way of life into evidence of a damning lack of patriotism, while the fear that accompanied it persuaded us – in this case more understandably, I think – that there was no use in protesting over loss of liberty when national security was at stake.
On the whole, then, I’m glad that we no longer feel as we did on the days after 9/11: the fear of taking an airplane or driving over a bridge is thankfully gone, the hatred of all things foreign has gradually faded, and the possibility for a genuinely patriotic dissent is once again widely recognized. That our national discourse is now so shrill and divisive is of course unfortunate, but that’s better than standing arm-in-arm to sing our own praises and wait eagerly to exact our revenge. How tragic, though, that the “lessons” so many have taken from that day consistently get things so horribly backwards.
P.S. Henley’s take is among the best I read today.
(Image via Flickrer wallyg.)
Filed under: patriotism, personal
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