Shock Waves
After a shared national tragedy, what comes next?
`Everything will be different from now on." Or so says Tom Edelmann, a lawyer for a St. Louis bank. The sentiment was repeated again and again last week. As the horror sank in--and the enormity of the attacks came into focus--Americans from all over the country and all walks of life sensed that their world had changed. Any lingering illusions of national invulnerability were shattered. "I'm realizing life is never going to be the same," says Joseph Wanco, a restaurant owner in Wellfleet, Mass. "It's just a loss of innocence."
A loss of innocence, certainly. But also, possibly, the gain of things more valuable: realism, a sense of national unity and purpose, and even wisdom. Securing those will depend on how Americans respond to the challenges in the weeks, months, and years ahead, and many have already reacted in encouraging ways. From heroic acts of rescue to extensive volunteer efforts to a run on American flags at stores, people are displaying a civic and patriotic spirit that many social analysts had thought was lost.
Cause for hope. Many are turning to faith and sacred traditions for courage and guidance--and finding both. Even custodians of popular culture have shown admirable discretion and restraint, postponing baseball and other national pastimes; Hollywood and the networks have rescheduled violent fare. There have been troubling signs, of course, including senseless and cowardly attacks on Arab-Americans, Muslims, and others. Americans will have to be as wise about the measures they resist as the ones they embrace. But the discernment and good sense that many have shown in the early aftermath of unspeakable horrors give greatest cause for hope beyond the immediate tragedy.
Americans will certainly need all the judgment they can muster as they confront an elusive and problematic foe. "In Pearl Harbor, we knew our enemy, and they struck at the military," says Donald Hunt, 79, a World War II veteran and survivor of that attack. "This time around, we don't know our enemy, and they struck at innocent people." Compounding the problem, says Walter Reich, a professor of international affairs, ethics, and human behavior at George Washington University, is that "the enemy here is not a country but a cause without a specific address that is mobilized against us--against our very identity."
That kind of foe creates painful dilemmas. "We're going to have to respond in ways that threaten to undermine the very values and culture that enrage the people who attack us," says Reich. "This forces us to reconsider decisions we have already made--decisions about extrajudicial measures such as assassinations and other actions."
Those decisions are already being reconsidered, both in Congress and in the larger arena of public opinion. Whether intelligence agencies will return to such measures as working with "unsavory" members of terrorist cells remains to be seen. Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst and now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, counsels caution and says that the real intelligence need is more and better analysis of the huge amounts of information. He does admit, however, that he thinks that relying on so many official State Department covers for clandestine information gathering is a waste of human resources. "How are they going to collect information about terrorists when they are working out of embassies?" he asks.
More and more average citizens are resigned to the use of the most aggressive covert measures. "If they could assassinate bin Laden tomorrow, they should use whoever they need to do it," says Tina Rose, 48, a retiree residing in Livermore, Calif. Nathan Pearson, a biology graduate student at the University of Chicago, voices a similar view: "I don't see a fundamental difference between that [assassination] and warfare."
But to Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, it's important to be very clear about what we are responding to. "To talk about this as terrorism pushes the political implications into the background," he says. "It emphasizes the criminality of the act. It's not appropriate to call it an act of terrorism; [it is] an act of war." Since wars are about political objectives, he explains, America's response should not be on pursuing justice but on achieving political objectives. "Which raises a big question," says Bacevich: "What are our political objectives?" If they include supporting a global system compatible with American values, he concludes, "It would be a massive mistake to think that simply bombing someone would be a successful response."
Duty calls. A more sustained response of the kind that Bacevich and, indeed, President Bush call for will require a stronger sense of patriotic duty and obligation than most Americans have shown in recent years. While it is too early to say that it will last, such patriotism has taken a sudden and sharp turn upward. "In the wake of this week's events, I have had three different students in my office asking about where they would go and what they would study to become an FBI or NSA agent," says Beth Karling, a guidance counselor at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Calif. Military recruiters also report a surge in calls from people wanting to enlist, even from some who are long past enlistment age. Andy Bernard, 25, an aspiring writer and actor in Los Angeles, has been surprised by the awakening of his sense of duty. "I would gladly defend my country, which is interesting because in the past I have said that I don't believe in war. Now I don't think I would lose sleep over having to kill someone who was responsible for this." At the very least, many young Americans now look critically on their own former political apathy. "We have an obligation to take a more active role," says Lisa Jacobs, a first-year student at Harvard Business School.
Even as they think about what they must do differently, Americans are concerned not to change some things too much. In the short term, this means not rescheduling weddings long planned for the weekend following the attack, for example; many consider postponing major life events to be the same thing as letting the terrorists win. In the longer run, returning to life as usual means recognizing and respecting the strong libertarian tradition valued by many Americans. James McQuivey, research director at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., says, "We're just too fiercely independent [to give up civil liberties]. I'm not sure they're going to persuade the public that's necessary." He points out that the government already has extensive powers of surveillance that infringe upon privacy. "It's not like they wanted to tap somebody's phone and couldn't," he says.
"There's a fine line between safety and individual rights," says Todd Longsworth, an attorney in Boston, "and I hope maintaining that line won't be too hard." It need not be, says University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein, if people think more clearly about what the state should do in the execution of its most important responsibility: protecting citizens from those who use force or fraud against them. "People are already starting to talk about increasing security measures and putting more controls over citizens. Why not arm pilots or air marshals?" he asks. "If we had a more coherent program, we'd have more people trained to use arms to protect us from rogues and terrorists. We can lose a lot of freedoms and gain nothing, or we can meet the threat of force with force. "
Fears. Some Americans also recognize the need to guard against depriving the rights of some citizens in the name of national security. "We should think about how poorly we handled our fears in the past," says historian Alan Brinkley, citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as one of America's least glorious hours. "We all feel under attack--all of us Americans are under attack, and it's time to huddle together," says Maher Hathout, a cardiologist and spokesman for Muslim rights in Arcadia, Calif. "I'm always afraid of the ignorant. Always, in every society, there are fanatics and ignorant people who can react in unpredictable ways. When there's hype and innuendoes and premature actions, anything can happen."
But maybe there are signs of hope even where fear tends to rule. "The press has been more objective," says Farkhunda Ali, communications director of the American Muslim Council in Washington, D.C. "Ever since we found out that the real perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing weren't Muslim, the press is being more objective--at this time anyway."
Handling fears may be the most profound challenge of all, and America's religious leaders have taken a conspicuous lead. "My experience has been that people who never think of God any other time will turn their eyes, or at least their attention, to something outside themselves at a time like this," says the Rev. Peg Cantwell of Westlake Hills Presbyterian Church in Austin, which offered two special prayer services on the day of the attacks. She received a phone call from a man who couldn't reach relatives in New York City, asking her to pray for them during the services. "He said, `Can you just mention their names? Can you just say their names?' "
Before long, Cantwell expects to be fielding questions from parishioners whose faith in God was shaken by the tragedy of last week's attacks. "It's normal to be angry at God," she says. "If somebody comes to me in that mode, all I'd want to say is tell the Lord, `If you're there, I'm angry at you.' But the thing I'd like to try to help them not do is shut God out."
Coming up with answers is not easy, even for a religious thinker well known for helping ordinary people make sense of tragedy. "I'm as stunned and amazed as anyone," says Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Still, Kushner has an answer to the age-old question: How can a just God permit evil to flourish? "We believe in Judaism that God has given human beings the choice to opt for doing good or doing evil." But Kushner does not believe that this is the moment to get into elaborate theological explanations of why God gave people free will. The proper religious response now, he says, "is to dry the tears and hold the hands of people who have suffered losses." Michael Manning, a Catholic priest and host of the television show The Word in the World, speaks more assertively of the need to fight evil, even while acknowledging the painful truth that Christians in the past, during the Inquisition and the Crusades, allowed themselves to lose touch with the "God of love and patience and love for all."
Americans learned to balance their ideals of forgiveness and justice many times in their past. Their foes might consider how quickly they are forcing Americans to do so again.
With Angie Cannon, Andrew Curry, Dan Gilgoff, Carolyn Kleiner, Linda Kulman, Rachel Hartigan Shea and Ben Wildavsky
This story appears in the September 24, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.