What's become of us?
What's become of us?
The 9/11 anniversary prompts a look in the mirror
[I know you haven’t heard from me in a long time. Sorry it’s been so long. This weekend’s 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks brought me back out of the woodwork.]
I was just two years beyond my CNN decades when the 9/11 attacks occurred. I was new to teaching journalism and political science at the University of Delaware, and I had only recently weaned myself of the habit of keeping two or three TV sets turned on all the time in my office. My TVs were off when I picked up the phone to take a call from one of my graduate students just before 9am. He was blunt: “Do you have your TV turned on?” No. “Turn it on right now!”
Of course, that’s how it happened for a lot of people on September 11, 2001. And our TV sets stayed on almost continuously for days – even weeks – after that. We’ve all got our memories, but that’s not what I want to focus on here.
Night and day
I’ve been struck, recently, by the scope of what’s become of us since 2001. A couple of weeks ago, in a report about how flight attendants have are enduring the hostility of mask-resistors on their aircraft, I read a quote from Sara Nelson,
president of a national union representing flight attendants at 17 airlines. She lamented the sharp contrast of attitude between airline passengers after the 9/11 attacks two decades ago and those flying today. “Night and day,” Nelson said. Twenty years ago, she said, “every single person who came on our plane was completely on our team.” Today, amid the political polarization and the quick hostility fostered by our social media world, flight attendants are “punching bags for the public.”
Indeed, twenty years ago, in the pre-smart-phone, pre-social-media age, Americans were falling over themselves with outward patriotic displays. “United We Stand” bumper stickers were ubiquitous and banners and flags stretched across highway overpasses. American flags were everywhere. Three thousand people were killed in the 9/11 attacks, and Americans were devastated and united, nationwide.
Overnight “unity”
On the night of 9/11 itself, President Bush wasn’t wearing an American flag on his lapel during his Oval Office address.
But within a few days… and ever since… few politicians of any stripe would be seen without a lapel flag pin. Within a few weeks, television stations all across the U.S. re-dressed their news studios with red, white and blue bunting, flags, stars and stripes, joining the patriotic wave, and fanning its flames. TV news stations adorned their screens with patriotically-themed anti-terrorism slogans.
In that atmosphere, it was almost impossible even to suggest that - in any way - we ourselves might have been responsible for the attacks against the United States. A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when even President Bush was publicly asking “Why do they hate us?” I started giving a speech – a visual presentation, actually – to military and civilian audiences on the topic “What ‘They’ Think of Us… and Why It Matters.” (I still give that talk today, by the way.)
On one occasion, I was invited to give that presentation at the U.S. Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. In the aftermath of 9/11, I remember feeling the political chill in the large auditorium as I described how and why the United States was viewed negatively by people in many other countries. On the basis of my personal experience traveling the world for CNN, I knew the U.S. was not universally loved, despite the many ways we helped others and contributed toward their economic success.
But America’s negative image abroad wasn’t a message Americans wanted to hear after 9/11. On a different occasion, giving my talk at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a young officer in training, surrounded by hundreds of his uniformed colleagues, rose to ask me “Why can’t you [journalists] just get on board and help us win the war?”
Since then, of course, the United States launched the War in Afghanistan with the gusto of retribution and “United We Stand.” The U.S. went to war in Iraq, too, invading that country in an action that had nothing to do with 9/11, but took advantage of the post-9/11 united American mood.
My, how we’ve changed
Over two decades in the aftermath of 9/11, we constructed our “Hatfields & McCoys,” blue and red political silos, shaped by skilled manipulators at Fox “News” and fortified by our own new social media creations (hard to believe, but none of them were around in 2001). Those social media silos reinforced isolation, not just from the rest of the world, but even among our own American community. It was all accelerated by new “smart” phone addictions. Our smart phones facilitated instant and widespread dissemination of vitriol and division, the polar opposite of our post-9/11 “United We Stand” environment.
Now, two decades later, the U.S. has withdrawn abruptly and messily from Afghanistan with little (but not “nothing”) to show for the costly longest-war effort that began within days of the 9/11 attacks.
Between then and now, we have transformed ourselves from a nation united in the face of unimaginable tragedy… to a nation with a two decade record of nearly unthinkable behavior: torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, unmanned drone attacks killing civilians in faraway places, a foreign invasion based on unfounded suspicions of weapons of mass destruction, censorship of photos of returning American casualties in flag-draped coffins. And inflicting thousands of casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in South Asia and the Middle East.
Lost morality
It culminated this year in an unimaginable assault on the Capitol of the United States by American citizens who surely would have been “united” against such terrorism just twenty years ago.
In this connection, I very highly recommend watching Michael Kirk’s new PBS “Frontline” documentary called “America After 9/11,” which traces the legacy of 9/11 through the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden presidencies. It makes the case that the United States gradually but steadily lost the high ground, lost its very morality, as a consequence of many decisions taken by four presidents since the 9/11 attacks.