In the news business, we are in the habit of pumping up events. intern missing! president clashes with congress! Now we are trying, in the national interest, to preserve some calm. And with good reason. For a time last Tuesday morning it felt as if some unseen enemy might actually decapitate the nation’s financial, military and transportation systems. The Pearl Harbor analogy didn’t suffice. This was war on the American mainland for the first time since 1865, when Grant accepted Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. As the death toll rises to stunning levels, we can’t imagine going back to pedestrian debate about Social Security and education, much less tabloid distractions. The preoccupations of the recent past look like luxuries we can no longer afford.
But we should try to reclaim them. As my children watched the smoke rise over lower Manhattan–a mushroom cloud for their generation–they wondered why school wasn’t canceled. I’m glad it wasn’t. For years critics like me have bemoaned our culture’s short-term memory. We get saturation coverage–of Columbine, the embassy bombings, impeachment; then, when the finger-pointing and soul-searching is over, we move on with nary a backward glance. I’ve often viewed this as a bad thing, a sign of national shallowness and amnesia, evidence of the Western rot that the terrorists so despise. But maybe this cultural coping strategy is not so unhealthy after all. Maybe some of our “innocence” and capacity for denial is worth clinging to. Maybe the best approach this time is to retaliate, then sublimate.
Sublimate? Impossible now. But in the weeks to come, as we sort through the material and psychological wreckage, we need to be careful about the way we process the catastrophe. If we change too much–if we give rein to anger and pessimism–we’ll hand the terrorists another, bigger victory. They want America to lose forever that confident and carefree spirit they find so threatening. Why, after we mourn, should we give them that?
Obviously there are practical lessons we must learn. It’s a little bit like the war in Vietnam, where an elusive adversary made our World War II military approach look obsolete. At least in Vietnam we knew the enemy forces were somewhere in the country; today, they could be anywhere in the region. Once again, we’ve been fighting the last war, spending less than 10 percent of our $325 billion Defense budget on what has clearly been the biggest threat of recent years. The attack should kick off a broad national debate, not just on airport security and the colossal intelligence failure, but on what national defense actually means. Missile defense, for instance, looks just a tad off the point now.
At a minimum, we should resolve never again to ignore convincing warnings of threats to our national security. In March of this year, the Rudman-Hart Commission on National Security issued its report, saying unequivocally that the biggest threat to the United States was terrorism. The report gathered dust; we didn’t know real news when we saw it.
So we are paying the price of our complacency–the price of a decadelong flight from seriousness in the way we view public affairs. Since the end of the cold war, this country has been bound together by little more than collective consumerism and a mutual thirst for distraction. Media were tabloid media. Reality was reality TV. This summer, for instance, the United States conducted 16 days of bombing against targets in Iraq. Almost no one noticed, perhaps because the story involved no sharks. Even those stories more extensively covered than we might remember–like violence in the Middle East, the No. 2 story of the summer–didn’t resonate. The strife was worrisome but tiresome, and it did not seem much connected to our everyday lives.
It would be good if this week’s events changed that perception, but not too much. Shattering our complacency should not mean shattering our way of life. We need to make the world safe not just for ourselves and our children, but for at least some of our quintessentially American diversions and illusions. I’ll feel much better when the next silly celebrity scandal comes along, confirming that the skies can clear eventually. That’s why the collective psychological approach of the next few days is so critical. If we think of ourselves as constantly vulnerable, we will be more vulnerable. If we succumb to the modern equivalent of putting our money under the mattress, we will turn a short-term disaster into a long-term threat to who we are–and who we want to be.
It’s understandable how we might be spooked in the months ahead. Except for those who fought in Vietnam or live in extremely violent neighborhoods, Americans of this generation have little experience with threats to their physical safety. Most live longer than their parents, and experience less untimely death among family and friends. That makes the loss of control–the powerlessness–all the more acute.
We felt this way after the Oklahoma City bombing, too. At first, it seemed even worse than a foreign attack. This was homegrown terrorism–a reflection of something dark in the American soul. But in retrospect, Oklahoma City was easier to take; the work of a few right-wing kooks. Maybe the Kennedy assassination is a better comparison. Some light of rationality went out and we aren’t yet sure how to adjust our vision.
Americans are a generous people, now eager to help. But there is little concrete to do. No regiments to volunteer for or bandages to wrap or victory gardens to grow. But a more subtle collective task is, in fact, at hand, one that can be fulfilled in millions of conversations and small acts across the country. That national task is to avoid depressive and sour thinking; to suggest to friends that, say, selling their stocks would be unpatriotic; to avoid scapegoating Arab-Americans and backing the indiscriminate bombing of civilians; to engage the world, instead of telling it to go to hell.
The habit of thinking that international events have no relevance at home has been exposed as just as dangerous as pre-World War II isolationism. Just as the launching of the Soviet satellite sputnik in 1957 kicked off a boom in science and math education, maybe this will goad our schools to make international relations more central to American curriculum.
But as we learn about the Middle East we must avoid becoming like the Middle East. The challenge is to respond like the Israeli government–hitting back hard when we find the culprits–without becoming more like Israel, where soldiers patrol cafes with machine guns and life is conditioned by the daily threat of violence. If we’re not careful, we will condemn ourselves and our children to endless, episodic war. They hit us. We hit them. They wait awhile, then hit us again. That cycle would destroy the America we know.
For the past decade, we’ve lived in a golden age. Peace and prosperity–as good as it gets. Now that feels like past tense–as good as it got. But life on a downward slope is a profoundly un-American notion. As we grieve and heal, let’s not let a horrible day open a horrible era in the life of this country.
