Every morning for months after 9/11, as I walked to work, I would glance up at the Chicago skyline, just to make sure Sears Tower was still there. It always was, and I’d give a nod of relief, feeling a little foolish but unable to shed the thought that it might not be. I’ll bet you felt the same.
I don’t do this anymore. Not that I’ve forgotten. An attack on Sears Tower, once unthinkable, is forever thinkable now. But it’s not likely, not probable enough to be a daily concern. If measures have been taken to protect it, that’s good. We expect no less. Now, let’s stop obsessing about it and get on with life.
To many people, it still seems a little hasty, even one year later, to put 9/11 into context this way. It feels politically incorrect, if not irreverent, to think of an atrocity that killed so many people and riveted the nation as just another event among many, to be absorbed into the communal memory. A bad day, sure, one of the worst. But despite the rhetoric and headlines, not a day that changed the world, or even the nation, forever and ever.
How many Americans feel this way but hesitate to say so? Probably a lot, even most.
The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, in its quadrennial foreign policy poll, asked people across the nation to name the biggest problems facing the country today, both in foreign affairs and in general. No surprise–terrorism came in first in both polls. But surprise: It got one-third of the votes, much less than a majority.
Exactly 33 percent named terrorism as the biggest foreign policy problem, followed by a grab-bag of traditional issues–the Middle East, foreign aid, immigration, arms control, oil. In overall problems facing the country, terrorism was ranked first by 36 percent. But 22 percent ranked the economy first. Eleven percent worried about education, 9 percent about unemployment and so on.
International terrorism was seen as a “critical threat” by no less than 91 percent of Americans. But this menace got an 84-point rating in the last CCFR poll, in 1998, so the Sept. 11 attacks only heightened a concern that was already there. And there are a lot of other “critical threats”–nuclear proliferation, AIDS, Chinese power–that, according to the poll, keep Americans awake at night.
In other words, Americans take terrorism seriously. But only a minority think it’s the most serious problem we have.
All this shows, once again, that most Americans are sensible and mature. They’ve absorbed that day’s lesson that we weren’t invulnerable then and probably never will be. And they’ve gone on with their lives, which are, to an astonishing degree, unchanged.
There are two big exceptions.
First, the Americans who live in New York City and Washington. Distance lends detachment. Non-Americans, as shocked by 9/11 as the rest of us, recovered quickly: Veterans of terrorism themselves, they are getting disgusted with the United States for harping on it. Chicago and the rest of the country took longer to absorb it but seem to be doing it now.
Not New Yorkers and Washingtonians. It makes a difference if an atrocity happens near home.
New York and Washington are America’s two most influential cities. Their newspapers and magazines set the national agenda, their pundits fill its talk shows, their scholars dominate the think tanks and their officials run the country.
This may account for the second big exception, the Bush administration. The administration still treats 9/11 as a sort of Pearl Harbor, justifying everything it wants to do, and it tries to treat terrorism as the only problem facing the nation.
So far terrorism is used to excuse widespread abuse of the rights of suspected foreign terrorists and even of Americans suspected of terrorist activity. President Bush has wrapped himself in the flag while pushing tax and economic policies that will leave the U.S. in deficit for a decade. The war on terrorism has given the administration all the sanction it needs to ride roughshod over any ally or international institution that tries to slow it up.
Bush says the anti-terrorism campaign gives the administration the right to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, without congressional approval if necessary, even though there is no evidence linking the Saddam Hussein regime to the 9/11 attacks.
This is the policy of a weak and frightened administration still traumatized by 9/11 and unable to get past the horror.
Trauma is the most human reaction to what happened one year ago. The administration’s trauma that day was shared by the nation and much of the world. But trauma is no basis for a foreign policy, especially the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful nation.
An administration that cannot get past 9/11 wants to use it as an excuse for war. A nation that has absorbed the real lessons of 9/11 is not so sure. In conversation after conversation, even Bush Republicans say they don’t want to attack Iraq. If congressional Democrats are afraid to debate Iraq, voters aren’t: A national debate has begun, and Americans are thinking seriously and deeply about their country and what it should do.
Crucial problems go untended while the president and his aides obsess about a dictator who, most experts say, poses no threat to the U.S. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis demands focused American attention and is not getting it. A sane energy policy is needed, if only to cut America’s dependence on friends, like Saudi Arabia, that cause us more trouble than foes, like Iraq. Relations with Europe and other allies are being shredded by the administration’s unilateralist focus on terrorism. Corporate corruption has been forced on a government clearly reluctant to bite the hand that writes its checks.
Meanwhile, Bush tells crowds that he is out to get “the world’s worst leaders [who] blackmail America, threaten America or hurt America with the world’s worst weapons”–all of which is more frightened fantasy than fact. Bush claims he has not yet decided whether to attack Iraq but, in the next breath, he says any national debate is futile.
“One thing is certain,” he says. “I’m not going to change my mind.”
The attacks of 9/11 scarred America but did not topple it. Sears Tower still stands, and so does the good sense of most Americans. A mature country has moved beyond 9/11, and its government should do the same.
