I don’t feel much like looking back on 9/11 this morning because I don’t feel that I’ve actually looked away. There entered our lives that day an element of fear that wasn’t there before. Over time that feeling has sometimes sharpened, like during the financial crisis, and sometimes dulled, but it has never gone away, abiding within me as a kind of anger, confusion, and resentment. There’s a line form a Bruce Cockburn song–“Just sitting at home, growing tenser with the times”–that has seldom been far from my mind this decade.
It didn’t have to be that way. I was in London in August 2005, just a month after the terrorist attacks of July 7th that killed sixty people, and just two weeks after copy cat attacks fizzled without any loss of life. I expected to see in Piccadilly what I had seen in Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, Times Square and elsewhere since 9/11–a massive police presence, troops in camo gear armed with assault rifles. But I did not see that. I saw what seemed to be an ordinary deployment of bobbies. A few days into my trip, I spoke to some Londoners on a gondola of the London Eye. They told me that they were momentarily afraid, but after that, they felt obliged to jut get on with it. People before them had survived the blitz and IRA bombings. one of the people, a young woman who was an attorney said that she felt like she would be letting everyone down to allow the fear to take hold.
In America, after 9/11, the government encouraged the fear. Some of it was due to the officials own inadequacy, ignorance, and lack of preparation. Some of was due to cynical use of the opportunity to use the event for their own ends. We were presented with an al-Qaeda that like some legion of super villains. And although they presented themselves as guys with box cutters and ineffective shoe bombs, as prayerful zealots who hung around in strip clubs, the govenment presented them as fiends working in biochemical weapons and smuggling plutonium out of decrepit Soviet missile bases, working at the behest of arch fiends like Saddam Hussein.
Now we see that they were more like mobsters–some of them clever, some of them head cases, some dimwits–and that they can defeated by a dedicated force determined to arrest or kill them.
Instead our government lost its head. The journalist Ron Suskind reported that Dick Cheney felt he had to protect America against any threat that had one percent of a chance of succeeding. Imagine: one percent. The one public official in our government who held a reputation for steadiness and imperturbability felt he needed to act against everyt threat that had a percent chance of success. That was simply an hysterical response, an out-of-proportion response that led us to a preposterous and unrelated war, Guantanemo, renditions, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, on and on.
Ostensibly all these measures were taken to enhance my safety. Do you know what would really enhance my safety? Losing twenty pounds.
The fear that was born on 9/11 contaminates our society and our politics the way the debt of subprime mortgages continues to contaminate our economy. And in our fear, in our barely suppressed fear and rage, we are turning on one another. We ought to lock arms and move ahead, baby step by baby step if necessary, until we can rebuild our faith in one another and in our government. Ten years is long enough–we need to stop taking counsel of our fears.
(I took these photos two or three weeks after 9/11, standing on Broadway looking west, about three blocks from Ground Zero. The center photo shows a clothing store on Broadway, with displays of jeans and the other goods covered in the dust that had spread after the collapses.)