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If memory serves, it was a pretty unremarkable Monday. The state fair was over. School was back in session and the weather forecast was for fine late summer weather all week. The morning newspaper’s front page was dominated by model aircraft enthusiasts and the place of giant Pixie Stix in international cuisine. The day before, Brett Farve led the Pack to a 28-6 romp over the Lions, but Randy Moss and the Vikes couldn’t get the job done, going down 24-13 against the Carolina Panthers. About the only memorable thing about Sept. 10, 2001, was the day after.
For a long time, some claimed that the events of 9/11 “changed everything.” They didn’t — seven years after the Pentagon burned and the towers fell, that becomes more and more apparent. Considering the shock and horror of that morning, it is somewhat surprising and profoundly reassuring to realize how much of our lives are still rooted in Sept. 10. Seven years later, the price of gas, keeping a job and paying the mortgage trump al-Qaida in making our lives uneasy. Beyond padding through airport security in our stocking feet, most of us have yet to fire a shot in the War on Terror and, save for the folks who frequent lower Manhattan, there’s virtually nothing in our daily lives to remind us of the day when airliners became weapons.
“Freedom itself was attacked,” that day, or so the president said, but he then failed to rally the country and the world to its defense. Rather than call for sacrifice, he sent us shopping, and sure enough, not one mall has fallen to the Taliban in all of seven years.
But our freedom hasn’t fared so well. Fear is the terrorists’ only real weapon, and while we were busy running up consumer debt at a pace rivaled only by the White House-sponsored government spending spree, fear was given free rein.
The fires still burned in the rubble when the men in Washington began to talk of “the Homeland,” setting America apart from the world, throwing up a psychic wall around a country long prideful of being the great refuge for the world’s tired, the world’s poor. We were quietly encouraged to look at newcomers with the narrow eyes of fear and suspicion and to accustom ourselves to being looked at in the same way.
In ways earlier generations would never have understood, fear quickly became part of the American way of life. Seven years ago one goofball was caught with an exploding sneaker and ever since no American has boarded a plane without removing his shoes in tribute to this perverse vision of jihad. A half-baked plot involving pop bottles and hydrogen peroxide panicked an entire country to the point where shampoo and tooth paste are now regarded as weapons of mass destruction. We’ve accepted the threat level will forever stand at orange — without knowing what that means.
And when, on the government’s say-so, we accepted Adidas and Prell as legitimate threats, how could we resist their assertion that other things and other people — of which we had at best shadowy and uncertain knowledge — weren’t truly out to get us.
It was a devil’s bargain. We battled 9/11 by pretending it would always be 9/10 and the men in Washington built Gitmo in our name. A people whose nation founded itself upon the principal that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” we allowed ourselves to be frightened into turning a blind eye when those rights were ignored, abrogated and stood on their head. We let ourselves be scared into a war based on falsehoods and scared out of insisting that it be brought to an end.
If American freedom was the terrorists’ target and fear their measure of victory, this War on Terror has been fought to our disadvantage. After seven years, our liberties are constricted, our reputation tarnished, our soldiers in harm’s way and our great patriotic shopping spree has left us broke, in debt and foreclosed upon. Bin Laden’s chauffer sits in prison, but only after dropping off his passenger at an address all our waterboards and special renditions have yet to reveal.
Still, the events of 9/11 and their aftermath haven’t “changed everything.” The Constitution, though tattered around the edges, remains the supreme law of the land, and citizens with the courage to prize liberty above security still rally in its support against all enemies, foreign and domestic. To have the courage to live like it’s the 10th of September may well be our ultimate victory, our ultimate vindication.
Contact Jerome Christenson at (507) 453-3500 or jchristenson@winonadailynews.com. For Jerome’s comments on this, that and something else check out “Up on the wrong side of the bed” at www.rivervalleyblogs.com/jerome/ or go to www.winonadailynews.com.
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