Reflections on 9-11's Legacy

As noted in a post yesterday, in my view, the legacy of 9-11 is a nation that has thrown aside many of it's founding principles and which, after a brief uniting in the initial weeks after the terror attack a decade ago is now more divided than in the past. Greed, wealth disparity, selfishness and a contempt for others are now the hallmarks of the Republican Party and many who claim to worship the Bible and yet make a mockery of the Gospel message. Yes, problems and division existed before 9-11, but in so many ways 9-11 and the knee jerk reaction of many set the stage for the nation we encounter today. The sad truth is that today those who claim to honor the nation most and wear their patriotism (and religion) incessantly on their sleeves are the betrayers of what the nation once stood for. They dishonor the dead of 9-11. Here are some highlights from opinion pages, starting with the Virginian Pilot:

In the first days and weeks, the country united, its people drawn together as only grief can. Names like Todd Beamer, among those who fought the hijackers on Flight 93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania, and Father Mychal Judge, who spent his last moments ministering to firefighters in the lobby of the north tower, came to illustrate the courage and selflessness that defined the country's response.

And slowly, at home and abroad, the American ideals of liberty, justice and respect for human rights, long our touchstones, have been incrementally occluded in the name of safety. If trust and a sense of security defined pre-9/11 America, a nagging fear and anxiety have so far defined the decade since. Americans have adapted to a changed world, and understandably so.

The New York Times has a number of reflections as well. Here are some highlights:

America has not been enlarged in the years that have passed. Based on false pretexts, we were drawn into a misdirected war that has exacted enormous costs in lives and money. Our civic life is tainted by a rise in xenophobia that betrays our best ideals. As we prepared for a war on terrorism, we gave in to a weakening of the civil liberties that have been the foundation of our culture.

It seemed, in the days after 9/11, as though we stood at the juncture of many possible futures. There was as much hope as grief, as much love as anger, and a powerful sense of resilience. We still stand at the juncture of many possible futures. They are occasioned not by what terrorists in four airliners did to us, but by what we have done in the decade since. As a nation, we have done a better job of living with our fears, sadly, than nurturing the expansive spirit of community that arose in those early days.

Perhaps in time we will realize that the full meaning of what happened on 9/11 resides in the surge of compassion and hope that accompanied the shock and mourning of that September day.

Robert Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times has a telling piece, Here are some excerpts:

In the decade since the attacks of September 11th, Americans have turned inward. We have become a nation obsessed with guarding our borders, particularly the Mexican border, even as ghostly TSA images of our naked bodies reach upward, as though under arrest.

What is maddening us is that the wars of 9/11 can have no ending, because we have no clear purpose, because they have no clear adversary. We are not fighting nations; we are fighting peasants and mercenaries and religious ideologues and millionaires. In the war against terrorism, there will never be an "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month"; it will always be 9/11.

But an America that only guards against a dangerous world diminishes its power in the world. In the last ten years, China has usurped the noun Americans thought we held the patent to—the "future."

While we have deployed troops backward, into the Bible, China has built dams in Africa and made trade agreements with South America. The Chinese have welcomed young men and women from the Third World to Chinese universities. While U.S. troops are killed building roads between tribal villages in Afghanistan, the Chinese sign mineral contracts in Kabul.

Hemmed in by an adversarial world, we turn on each other: President Bush was, in the eyes of his critics on the left, a fool wound up by big business. President Barack Obama, according to his critics on the right, is a socialist and a Muslim. Our Congress has become an international scandal. Conservatives versus progressives.

About the only thing that Washington and the nation can seem to manage these days are monuments—we are monument mad, anniversary obsessed. Which leads us to Ground Zero, the tenth anniversary.

This year, put your hand on your heart for all who were lost, for all we have lost, then turn from this place and look at it no more, and see what our nation has become.