9/12/01: Ten Years Later

There’s been a quote floating around the last few days… “It’s not what happened on 9/11 that defines America, but what happened on 9/12.” The meaning here is that it’s not the tragedy itself that should be memorialized, but the way we as a people reacted to that tragedy. If that’s true, I think we’ve created a legacy of embarrassment to pass down to our children.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of good that people did those first few days. Professionals and civilians alike diving into the rescue effort, others across the country donating time and money, the whole country rallying behind the government, confident that any steps they would take would make us safe from further attacks and avenge what had been done to us. One of the things that actually gave me hope on that day – when we still didn’t know whether there were more attacks on the way – was the fact that I went to the local Red Cross blood donation center, only to be turned away because so many others had shown up, unable to think of anything else they could do.

Unfortunately, that sense of rallying together, the days when every American was a friend and we were all on the same side, lasted only a few days. In our search for answers to the question “Why would anyone do this?”, we began looking for people to blame.

The government needed someone to hate too, and something to do. But how do you go about attacking an enemy that isn’t a particular country or a particular race, but is only people with a certain belief system? Given a carte blanche by the people, with the only edict being “Do what you have to – don’t let this happen to us again”, the government chose to blame a country that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. Iraq, they announced, was not only funding the Taliban, but building weapons of mass destruction. It’s easy to see why the ruse worked… the thing we were most afraid of was a replay of what had already happened, maybe a similar attack on an even more monumental scale. I’ll admit, when I saw the satellite photos and was told what our intelligence purported to be was true, I believed it and supported the decision to invade Iraq. What I didn’t know – what none of us knew – was that the ones we trusted with our military’s course of action either flat out lied, or merely saw what it wanted to see. There were no weapons, but at least there was a dictatorial regime that we hadn’t been quite able to root out ten years previous (on the watch of our current president’s father, no less). Not only that, it gave us a focus to our hate. Saddam Hussein was the culprit, and had to be deposed.

The paranoia didn’t stop there, of course. Because that’s not how paranoia works. It’s a virus that occupies an area and then expands, finding something new to fixate on. The easiest targets were Muslims, simply because they were the same religion as the man who perpetrated the attacks. And even that wasn’t true – anyone familiar with Islam will tell you that what Osama bin Laden practiced can hardly be called Islam at all. It’s ridiculous, like blaming all Christianity for Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma. But Muslims has factors working against them… they’re recognizable for their manner of dress, and they’re a minority in America that no one paid much attention to. And why? Because they hadn’t done anything to merit negative attention. But thanks to the government and media reportage, all of a sudden people everywhere in the country thought that Islam routinely preached hatred and violence against America as one of its basic tenets. The racial profiling and bigotry persists even today.

Next came the people who criticized the government’s actions. Even the slightest hint that you disagreed with how the United States was handling the decision could garner death threats – look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks. That door swung both ways too… people with extreme right-wing ideas and evangelical Christians with their rhetoric about the “end times” suddenly were gaining credibility and followers. (But really, why does a terrorist attack in America herald Armageddon any more than all the other daily atrocities in the world?) It’s something we’re seeing now more than we did even in the midst of all the “national security” fervor, and it makes me worry that something so far away from real-world facts is actually being taken somewhat seriously.

So we have a lot to answer for, this generation that lived through 9/11. I wish I could say that I was always above it, but I can’t truthfully do that. I’m reminded of the time in late 2001 when there was a series of photographs being passed around via email, in which a Middle Eastern man sets fire to an American flag, but then drops it, and accidentally sets his own clothes alight. This was being virally sent around *as* *comedy*. And I passed it on, just like almost everyone else.

Recently I heard a point made on the radio, and restating it is the best I can do at ending this with any kind of silver lining. The question posed was this: Would the people’s revolutions in Egypt and Libya have occurred, if they hadn’t been shown that their dictatorial leaders weren’t entirely unassailable? I suppose if they had happened in 2005 instead of 2011, I’d be more inclined to say yes.