For ordinary Americans, history often is remembered as a series of Where were you when you heard? moments. We remember where we were when we learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, that John F. Kennedy had been shot, that Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon, that three gunmen had shot local law-enforcement officers and fled into the canyon country. We frame larger events in our personal contexts and try to figure out what they mean for us.
When terrorists struck on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, most residents of Southwest Colorado were just beginning the day. We scrambled for television sets and watched, horrified, as jets flew into the World Trade Center, over and over and over, then as the towers collapsed in the same endless loop, and later as smoke billowed from the Pentagon and fighter jets patrolled above. Few of us had close ties to anyone at that rarified level of the financial world, but we knew those buildings and the hijacked planes held human beings loved by parents, spouses, children, siblings and friends. When we saw the specks plummeting to their deaths, we could picture ourselves in that final freefall.
Much has been written this summer about the countrys responses military, political, societal. In the past 10 years, some of our initial assumptions and decisions have been proven wrong, and some of our fears have been justified.
Not too long ago, most Americans believed that the lagging nations of the world eventually would emerge into freedom, and that the United States would remain the leader of the enlarging free world. We didnt anticipate the animosity we would see on so many foreign faces, animosity we acknowledged provoking in some ways but that we surely did not deserve.
Our national grief and anger gradually solidified into two forms of resolve: We would identify and eliminate the risk of such attacks, and we would win the hearts and minds of those who considered us their enemies. In a decade, we have made progress some of it unexpected but not enough. We have learned that we will always be vulnerable, and the world will not, in our lifetimes, be united behind us. Our expectations must be reconsidered.
We have rediscovered that freedom and justice for all are costly and difficult to achieve.In dealing with adversaries both foreign and domestic, sometimes as close as the next voting booth, we have sometimes let our hurt and fear calcify into hatred. We are less willing to trust and quicker to label others as foes. Our partisan disputes are bitter and unproductive. We remain willing to spend many billions of dollars to fight wars and have become less willing to feed and house the poor. Our understanding of relationships, both micro and macro, has come to depend a great deal on the other-ness of those not exactly like us. That may be 9/11s most profound legacy, sometimes reduced to a trite sound bite: The terrorists have won. They have not, but we have lost something valuable, and we should not let it slip from memory without trying to reclaim it. Our idealism is still justified; that it is tempered with realism is no reason to abandon it. Lets not forget the place we stood before 9/11.
