Thinking Back on 9/11

It was a beautiful day in Santa Barbara, and a stunning crystal clear day in New York City. My daughter, Miranda, was only eight days old. I took my son to kindergarten at Roosevelt Elementary School, and was on my way home when my wife called and told me that an airliner had flown into the World Trade Center. From then on, like most Americans, I was glued to my TV, trying to make sense of an incomprehensible event.

Our country was attacked, not by another country bent on invading our shores, but by people inflamed by ideology and hatred. Within a few hours, Al Qaeda became part of our mindset, part of our collective history, and the target of what would become a war on a tactic.

On the night of 9/11/2001 I remember jotting down some questions that ranged from how the terrorists planned and coordinated their stunning attacks, and what nations provided them resources and information, to whether the attacks would make the United States reconsider its behavior in the world and its foreign policy. Would we seek to understand before retaliating – or just retaliate with our massive military might?

I remember some weeks or months later reading a New York Times Op-Ed piece by Susan Sontag in which she accused George W. Bush of infantilizing 9/11 with his posing and cowboy rhetoric. By the time Sontag’s piece appeared, it was clear that the US had no intention of using 9/11 for self-examination; we were out for blood, out to redeem our dead and wounded, set on a course that would take us from Afghanistan to Iraq. Bush told the nation repeatedly that Al Qaeda hated our freedom, when in fact what Al Qaeda hated was our imperial behavior. Sontag, by the way, was pilloried in the media for her opinion.

Terrorism – or the threat of terrorism – never changed my family’s daily life. Except when I fly, life goes on as it did before. I realize that there is no protection against a terrorist attack, no safe haven, which is precisely the reason Terrorism is employed as a tactic by the powerless against the powerful. Terror breeds fear, fear breeds a circle-the-wagons mentality that can justify a range of self-defeating actions.

What frightens me more than the threat of Terrorism is the erosion of the rights and laws that make America what it is, and govern what America might one day be. The means of keeping the nation safe do not justify the end, if those means are wrong. I would almost rather have less safety and an intact Constitution, along with an Executive Branch held in check by the co-equal branches of government, than the trampling of Law in the name of Safety that we’ve witnessed in the past five years.