Posted on: Sunday, October 6, 2002

America never was immune to attacks

By Haynes Johnson

Of the many misbegotten myths of the 1990s, the greatest was the belief that we were different from all the peoples of the Earth. We were immune from the ravages that afflicted other societies, impregnable against distant threats.

Everything was in our favor. With the great expansion of technotimes, we had arrived at a singular moment. Our democratic capitalistic system was the envy of the world. Our military might was unsurpassed.

We were No. 1, the world's only superpower, secure and confident in our new riches and new power, unchallenged in our rapid ascension to even greater heights of prosperity and achievement. If threats did emerge, they were out there. And we had the power and the capacity to deal with them. It can't happen here.

The shattering of that illusion on 9/11 was the last, and most tragic, of the bubbles that burst during the era of the long boom. In one blinding moment, suddenly and shockingly every American was forced to confront the wrenching reality that we weren't unique after all. We were as vulnerable as the Israelis or the Palestinians or any others facing threat of sudden attack. We were just like everybody else.

The attacks of 9/11 did more than shred America's overweening sense of complacency about its security and its future. Not only can it happen here, it can happen with an ease and swiftness difficult to fathom given those beliefs of our invulnerability.

For Americans in particular, the pictures implanted on 9/11 will remain indelible, and so will those reflecting the searing events that continued to alarm the public in succeeding weeks. To a degree probably never before felt in the American experience, eclipsing even the shocks of assassinations, sneak attacks on our military bases and the outbreak of civil war on our own soil, the instant changes in daily lives and attitudes wrought by 9/11 were unprecedented.

Above all was the unforgettable memory of the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians who died horribly in hitherto unimaginable circumstances. In these and countless other ways, lives and aspirations were altered. Whether they were "forever changed" is another matter. In fact, perhaps the most striking aspect about the aftermath of 9/11 was how quickly America began to slip back into familiar habits and patterns.

America in the wake of the new world after 9/11 demonstrates an old tendency to rivet its attention on only one challenge at a time, a preoccupation that essentially means either ignoring or failing to deal adequately with other great problems. Now, in our newly altered world, the only question that matters is what lessons America learns from the experience, and what actions it takes in response to it.

I believe the devastating experience of 9/11 requires us to forge a new national partnership between our public and private sectors, one that puts aside destructive, mindless attacks on each other while celebrating the need for vigorous, informed political debate. It requires achieving a new unity of purpose of a kind we have not had since World War II.

It means putting aside the corrosive belief that government is irrelevant, that public service doesn't matter, that we can privatize everything and allow "the magic of the marketplace" to work for the common good unfettered by the sensible oversight and regulation that ensure the fairness and trustworthiness of the financial system.

It means nothing less than changing the way we as a people think and act in the way we educate and inform ourselves as we draw on the ideas and talents of those who can help us see what steps we need to take to preserve and protect ourselves.

After the horror and wreckage of 9/11, no longer can we afford to turn our eyes away from distant lands and peoples. We need to understand the sources of anger, discontent and hatred that confront us.

We need a new kind of Marshall Plan to address the hopelessness and poverty of the undeveloped world, a new form of Manhattan Project to enlist the best minds in science, technology, and medicine to help forge policies in our, and the world's, best long-term interests.

We need to teach history better, to bring into the public policy mix scholars who speak Farsi and understand the cyclonic currents sweeping the Islamic world.

We need to expand international exchange programs that help break barriers formed through lack of contact and ignorance. At the least, it would be nice if all American pupils studied foreign languages from grade school on.

Admittedly, I recognize such an agenda is easy to proclaim and infinitely harder to achieve. I further realize that offering such a sweeping list for change might seem to border on the na•ve. But I believe the reaction of the American people in the aftermath of 9/11 gives reason for optimism.

As always in the past when confronted with a national crisis, Americans rose to the new and, in many ways, more complex challenges. Despite fears of worse to come, they did not panic. They remained steadfast and supportive of their leaders and their system. The people's response to 9/11 formed an admirable portrait of the resilience of a nation under stress.

The status of the news media, an institution that has been viewed increasingly negatively in recent years by larger numbers of the population, registered a sharp upturn in public favor. Like the people themselves, in the wake of 9/11, the news media responded splendidly — but it took that crisis to bring out the best in the press.

A press that in large measure had cut back coverage of foreign affairs, closed foreign bureaus and focused more on trivia, now produced some of the finest journalism in my lifetime — serious, searching, often eloquent, and filled with the kind of context and perspective often missing in the scandal years of the 1990s.

The news media wasn't the only quarter to experience change. Elected officials rose to the occasion, laying aside partisan bickering, and the public expressed its approval of Congress and, most notably, the president.

President Bush displayed a welcome capacity for change. From a unilateralist, go-it-alone, American stance he shifted, at least temporarily, to acknowledging the need for international alliances, nation building and globalism, though recent events with Iraq and the United Nations have clouded that earlier, more positive, judgment about the president.

Both Bush and the leaders of his administration also deserve great credit for the way in which they warned Americans against the dangers of stereotyping or attacking those among us who look, dress, act and speak differently. The message was one of tolerance — and it was a message that American people for the most part either heeded or figured out for themselves.

Perhaps most reassuring was the sudden shift in perceptions about the role of government and public service. Now, people could see that public service meant heroic police and firemen who willingly went to their deaths attempting to extinguish the inferno that the World Trade Center had become.

It meant selfless nurses and emergency-room technicians, construction crews toiling amid unimaginable scenes of death and destruction. It meant faceless mail carriers who continued their burdensome daily rounds in the face of deadly attacks of anthrax unleashed on postal stations. It meant government workers and bureaucrats re-entering closed anthrax-contaminated buildings to carry out the people's business.

It meant anonymous government technicians and medical experts toiling to respond to bioterror attacks.

Hatred and terrorism will not be eliminated in a lifetime, if ever, nor will age-old problems of human misunderstandings and mistakes. America cannot escape history; we must face the terrors as well as the progress it imposes over the centuries.

There is no fail-safe method to guarantee our security. We ignore the lesson graven on our National Archives Building at our peril: Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. That lesson means being prepared to protect ourselves from assaults by enemies who threaten our democratic liberties and freedoms from within, as well as guarding against conventional military or terrorist forces who pose a different kind of threat from without.

As we emerge from the terrors of 9/11, the question is not whether America has changed. The question is whether America can adopt a new realism about its problems and maintain the determination to deal with them — a determination driven not so much by rekindled patriotism as by the more powerful instinct for self-preservation.

Excerpted, with permission of the author, from "The Best of Times," First Harvest edition 2002 (paperback), A Harvest Book, Harcourt Inc.; © 2001, 2002 by Haynes Johnson.

Haynes Johnson is the East-West Center’s George Chaplin Fellow in Distinguished Journalism, 2002. He will deliver the Chaplin Lecture on the topic “America and the Crisis of Change” at the East-West Center’s Keoni Auditorium, Hawai‘i Imin International Conference Center, 1777 East-West Road, 3 p.m. Tuesday. The lecture is free and open to the public.