9/12/21: I suppose I have to rouse myself to commemorate twenty years after 9/11. We’ve accomplished one thing, which is to make the phrase 9/11 no longer a reference to an emergency call but instead to that day.
What has happened to the United States? The country I knew started changing much more rapidly after that event. The changes were already there: Going off the gold standard (thanks, Nixon); neoliberalism (thanks Reagan, Clinton et al.); the American delight over and exploitation of the collapse of the Soviet Union (thanks, Harvard boys); the US’ misguided notion that the country could somehow extend its empire into the Middle East (thanks, George H.W. Bush); and so on.
Because, in fact, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the start of the US collapse. It had to be—we two countries had been joined at the hip since at least 1918.
What 9/11 accomplished was an exponential effect, a hockey stick-shaped acceleration, something that we mostly think of these days as indicative of catastrophic global warming. The shift in the US, the one we have yet to acknowledge, has been from world-dominating post-WWII power to the growing but still mostly unconscious realization that America’s time has passed and that we had better, as Chalmers Johnson warned in his Sorrows of Empire, let the empire go in order to save the country.
We were never going to be as reasonable as the Brits were at losing their empire in the last century, so the US continued blundering along until that fateful day, when things got messier and a lot worse for democracy—a lot quicker.
NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, in her poignant and pointed essay today looking back on 9/11, characterizes what has happened: The nation has deteriorated in a fundamental way. She writes:
“[…] this epoch of aggressive jingoism, ethnic profiling, escalating paranoia, torture, secret prisons, broken soldiers, dead civilians and dashed imperial dreams has left freedom in retreat both globally and here at home.”
Too true, but the question is: Why? What wrong turn did we make?
The wrong turn is the same one we individuals make in our own lives—something terrible happens but instead of facing it, admitting the trauma, figuring out how to live with it without lashing out at everyone around us—instead of that, the nation has behaved like those who believe with all their heart that this should not have happened—because we’re so exceptional. Thinking that way is a prescription for disaster.
When 9/11 befell us, the world reached out a consoling, empathic hand to us. We misunderstood the hand: We thought it was keeping us protected when in reality it was saying: We know how it feels; it’s happened to us. Welcome to adulthood, bittersweet as it is.
Instead of the proper lesson any child needs to learn, we instead became the bully of the planet, stuck in our PTSD reaction to the event, lashing out at everyone because we were unable to accept our own vulnerability, our own limits.
Yes, the death and destruction were tragic, but more people around the world die every day of pointless diseases than died on that day. Even now we are hoarding COVID vaccines, effectively allowing others to die.
When will we face up to our mere humanity, to the fact that we aren’t the exceptional nation?
The first step, of course, in any change is to admit the problem. We can’t even do that.