And so, six months after Sept. 11, many among us have begun to treat the day and what occurred then as a deeply revered scrapbook memory. The date is fodder for anniversary observances, for the unveiling of brass plaques, for the pointing skyward of floodlights to mimic, in ways celestial but also ghostly, Manhattan’s missing twin towers.
That’s good. Pausing to remember, and reflect, is balm for the soul.
Up to a point. Beyond that point, viewing Sept. 11 as past rather than prologue is dangerous–perhaps mortally so.
The half-life of our national attention span can be brief. The examples are endless, but to quickly cite two: The name Columbine still evokes sadness, yet our well-meant determination to curb firearms and bullying in schools has lost its urgency. Our early alarm at the ease with which Timothy McVeigh acquired ammonium nitrate fertilizer for his Oklahoma City truck bomb has vanished; press reports last year suggested that the stuff is easier to purchase than beer, which at least is subject to minimum age requirements.
Put bluntly, we tend to fall asleep at the switch. Just 10 days after Sept. 11, Northwestern University historian Michael Sherry predicted in an interview with the Tribune that “continued evidence of an enemy threat”–that is, more terrorist attacks–would provoke Americans to accept the costs of military action indefinitely. The more cunning move, he warned, would be for those who hate America to lie low for a time, to let us grow complacent and distracted.
The current issue of Time magazine yanked many subscribers back to reality with the question on its cover: “Can we stop the next 9/11?” Not “Will there be,” but “Can we stop.” And that, not anniversary reverie, is the point. After a lull like the one we’re enjoying, the likelihood of follow-up attacks is very high. Just as lulls separated the first World Trade Center bombing (1993), the Khobar towers truck bomb in Saudi Arabia (1996), the car-bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), the motorboat bombing of the USS Cole (2000)–and Sept. 11, 2001.
Most Americans understand this, which is why support for this nation’s roving pursuit of the people who want us dead remains extraordinarily high. We have come a long way since Sept. 20, when President George W. Bush’s use of the word “war” to describe our situation unnerved some who said he had sounded too bellicose.
Much of that prissy Pecksniffery has, thankfully, subsided. Polls suggest most people wouldn’t argue today with a point made last October by U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) writing in The Wall Street Journal:
“War is miserable business. The lives of a nation’s finest patriots are sacrificed. Innocent people suffer and die. . . . However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that will be lost when war claims its wages from us. Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must.”
Sunday night, CBS will remind us of why that remains our imperative. The airing of you-are-there footage, shot as thousands of people were incinerated, crushed or vaporized, is the most vivid memorial still possible. That, not plaques or beacons, best reminds us that Sept. 11 is an open wound we ought not be too quick to suture.
The aggressiveness of this nation’s military response over the last five months, since bombs began to fall Oct. 7, is self-evident. A decade earlier, it took then-President George Bush more than five months just to prepare for the launch of the Persian Gulf War.
There is also, of course, the quieter search for ways to reduce the Third World hatred that fueled Sept. 11. Many Americans accuse their country of paying little attention to the heartbreak and anger of those trapped in dead-end nations where impoverished multitudes have few prospects but generations more of the same.
Whether Americans’ disregard for the poverty of others helped tee up Sept. 11 needs to be confronted. Still, some of the intramural criticisms now sound facile, even naive. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan noted last week that terrorism also is the product of failed governments and exploitative leaders. “The poor,” he said, “have enough burdens without being considered likely terrorists simply because they are poor.”
This weekend, six months out from the dive-bombings of Sept. 11, Americans are hip-deep in platitudes: We supposedly are a changed nation, we have lost our innocence, et cetera.
Maybe so. But more important, we also are locked in a Darwinian struggle for survival that may well pit us against thousands of operatives who have little to lose. After six months of calm, that sentence may strike some as melodramatic. It is not, however, inaccurate.
That isn’t to say we should avoid diversions, from wondering where David Letterman will draw his meager paycheck to praying for a double-knockout when Paula Jones meets Tonya Harding this week in TV’s “Celebrity Boxing.”
But the most pressing television appointment is with CBS on Sunday night. More of what the footage portrays logically awaits us if we let the observance of anniversaries mark the dilution of our resolve. Until our enemies’ backs are broken, it is a safe bet that further attacks will arrive. The only questions are where–and when.
