Woven through this country’s history is a psychic demon we rarely acknowledge.
Our crises are not just of the purely external sort, the oncoming threats that prompt our fight-or-flight responses. Our most recurrent crisis comes from deep within us: We have chosen to be vulnerable. Boast as we do about living in a free society, we often are tragically reminded–as we are in the wake of Tuesday’s cataclysm–of a free society’s costs.
Nowhere are we more exposed than in the great cities of this land. We have laced them with mighty arteries–water lines, communications cables, electrical wires, mass transit routes–and we have built tall structures to hold their workers by the thousands.
And then, come a Tuesday in September, we realize that for all our progress, all our technology, our cities are infinitely more vulnerable to attack than were the coarse, walled cities of medieval Europe. “The very advances that enhance our lives provide new routes of access for those who want to harm us,” says University of Wisconsin historian Stan K. Schultz. “Every modern technology–architecture, flight, airport security–holds within it the capacity to force us two steps back.”
The anger, grief and resolve that suffuse Americans today have, in truth, washed over our forebears for centuries. Yes, this is a country that has long felt vulnerable. But this also is a country that, more than many others, has found a way to resolve those emotions without surrendering its essential freedoms.
Time and again, our relative newness as a nation has fed our insecurity and threatened our will to stand strong.
As early as the 1670s, Puritan preachers in New England colonies delivered jeremiads against the devotion of newly arrived Americans to the worldly goods that ships were delivering to Boston; the preachers feared that possessions from exotic ports would divert the newcomers from building a nation.
A century later, the grip of a British king and his parliamentarians pushed Americans into a revolution that many expected their little country not to survive. Before the War of 1812, so-called Warhawks in present-day Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky argued that the United States would be choked, perhaps to death, if it did not clear the frontier of English and French forts.
In the late 1800s, widespread alarm that we were a 10th-rate seapower–even Brazil was stronger–prompted the building of what became the mightiest navy on Earth. The 1915 sinking of the Lusitania by a torpedo attack from a German submarine helped nudge us into World War I, much as the bombing of Pearl Harbor tugged us into its numerical successor. Later, another threat from overseas–communism–drove a Cold War that felt remarkably warm when the Soviets deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba.
Each of these threats, some exaggerated but many just as real as Tuesday’s calculated assault, held the power to take America’s soul.
That did not happen. Our most lasting wound–from slavery, the Civil War and long-lasting tentacles of racial tension–was self-inflicted.
There is a profound reason why this nation has survived. It dates to those revolutionary times, specifically to a phrase that was ceaselessly repeated for more than a century. In moments of crisis, presidents and other politicians spoke of “this fragile experiment in democracy.”
What went unspoken in each of these moments of crisis was less reverent but more blunt: We must sacrifice together or we will succumb together. Not just stick together, but sacrifice together. That thought is not unique to the United States. But it has resonated here more intensely than in many other lands.
It has meant different things at different times. During World War II, for example, the rationing of gasoline, rubber and sugar wasn’t solely to help the war effort. The ethos of the day demanded that America do more than send its soldiers and hardware to war, and support them with needed commodities. The companion motive for rationing goods, often overlooked in today’s retellings, was to steel this nation’s spine against further vulnerabilities it couldn’t foresee.
What gets sacrificed this time isn’t yet clear. Perhaps it will be the naive but common assumption that we live in a world bounded by two oceans and our own, often selfish concerns. Perhaps it will be the Balkanization of Americans into groups that have had the luxury of pursuing their own agendas for lack of an overarching American agenda.
But in wreaking their terrible havoc, Tuesday’s perpetrators have awakened something within millions of us.
In an age of fast this and fast that, they have helped us remember that we can feel something far deeper than fleeting surprise. They have taught us anew that we must sacrifice together or we will succumb together.
They have reminded us that we are vulnerable–and that we cherish our vulnerabilities above all else.
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So, today, we will arise. Shopkeepers will turn the locks and open for business. Children will walk to school. Farmers will return to the preparations for harvest. In small towns and big towns people will regain the energy and ingenuity and resolve of the freest nation on Earth.
Terrorists have assaulted the symbols of America’s economic and military might. They have taken countless lives.
But like the others who challenged this country, they will not shake America’s spirit.
These will not be easy days. Images of buildings billowing smoke will give way to stories of thousands of personal tragedies. There will be sorrow and rage. We will hear tales of profound heroism. We will understand public spirit in a way that may have slipped our nation’s consciousness in recent years.
Our sense of sanctuary and isolation will be tested. There will be restless moments as we attempt to fully comprehend the enormity of what has happened. We can build on these sober moments. Give blood. Volunteer our time. Respond to calls for financial relief. We should not stand still.
Within days our state of siege will loosen. Our routines will return. Some of our customs inevitably will change. Expect to see heightened security in train stations, government offices, financial institutions, court systems, national monuments–any place where people can gather. Any place that symbolizes U.S. power and prestige.
How dramatically are we willing to curtail our liberties to protect our security? It has been assumed, for example, that American citizens would never tolerate the delays and inconvenience required to make air travel secure. We are about to find out.
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We are, as well, about to find out how America responds, for the first time in 60 years, to an act of war on its own soil.
This nation has the military power to devastate any organization or any state that was involved in this terrorism. It will not be constrained by the reach and power of its weaponry. It will be constrained by notions of national sovereignty and international law.
In recent years, many Americans have grown impatient with this nation’s response to terrorism.
The U.S. did not retaliate for the deadly attack on the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, which took the lives of 241 Marines and sailors. It did not retaliate for the assault on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, which killed 19 U.S. airmen and wounded more than 250 others. In each case, no definitive proof of responsibility was discovered.
America did seek and deliver a measure of justice for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Following a scrupulously fair trial, the terrorist group’s ringleader, the blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, was sentenced to life in prison without parole and some of his followers received prison terms. Yet those sentences did not serve as a deterrent to terrorism. Indeed, they may have served as a provocation.
That impatience will amplify to outrage as the death toll from Tuesday’s violence rises.
As a nation, we’ve made our choices. We accept vulnerability as a price of freedom. We prize justice above vengeance.
But justice demands punishment commensurate to the crime. The terrorists who orchestrated these acts have blood on their hands. Soon enough, it may be their own.
