Many of us remember that day, the days and weeks that followed, the torment of imagining being one of those on a plane-turned-bomb, about to die, about to kill. Photographs of people plunging to their deaths from the top stories of the World Trade Centers filled printed newspapers. Missing posters plastered the walls of subway stations and scaffolding all the way up the avenues. Portable phone stations were parked all through downtown up to Soho so that the missing or the lost could make contact.
The city was stunned. It had been walloped. But the nation was strong. The nation rallied around the victims and the city, which had itself been victimized. Rudy Giuliani, already one of the greatest mayors of New York, became a national hero. From Philly, where I lived at the time (before the rents went down and I was able to move back to the greatest city in the world), watching Giuliani on the news talk about suspending alternate-side-of-the-street parking let me know the city would survive, that the country itself would be alright. It gave me hope.
We knew who hated us, and that awareness let us know, too, who we were. We were a nation of people who rushed into crumbling buildings in hopes of saving someone, anyone who needed it. We were a nation of people who rushed to hospitals to give blood. We were a nation of people who were proud to be American, who knew that we had been hit hard, but that we were resilient enough to withstand it, and to hit back.
That's when things got confusing. The narrative began changing, and instead of American heroes, we became American villains who had brought this on ourselves. Suddenly, the message was that the Islamic terrorists who took our lives and national security were entitled to do it; that we were the cause of their hate; that it was we who should repent, atone, and seek forgiveness. We were supposed to ignore the fact that those men who turned our commercial jetliners and civilians into bombs were doing so in the name of their god; out of hatred for us.
Those who rightly said that it was Islamic terrorists who had coldly and meticulously plotted, and then executed this butchery were called racist. It was the politically correct thing to do. It didn't take long for media and progressives to jump onto that train and drive it themselves.
America, and Americans, the message went, were to blame. We were the ones our media, academics and progressive elites held responsible for being attacked. Would any of these people or institutions tell a woman she was at fault for being beaten? Tell a child they were at fault for being bullied? No, but when it came to their own nation, they could see no other reality than that we had asked for it, and gotten what we deserved.
President George W. Bush's response, meanwhile, was to back the Patriot Act, an outlandish and egregious attack on American rights and freedoms. While the bill claimed that it was created in the interest of "uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required of intercept and obstruct terrorism," what it really did was open the door to warrantless surveillance of American citizens.
Eager to find who to blame and punish them, or at least to give the illusion of doing so, the George W. Bush administration launched a war against Iraq on March 19, 2003. From the vantage point of a proud American, this seemed absurd. There was a whole bunch of nonsense given about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein having nuclear weapons-grade "yellow cake" uranium that, as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell later testified, was exactly nonsense. Bush also expanded the federal government with the Department of Homeland Security on March 1, 2003, which now has nearly 250,000 employees.
I protested the Patriot Act, I protested the Iraq War, marching around New York uselessly with Jerry Springer and the Transit Workers' Union. When Bush's term was over and Obama was up next, I did not vote for him because he promised more funding for the US war in Afghanistan, and I knew how useless the entire undertaking had been.
DHS, formed to make America secure, now works even harder to disband American borders. Perhaps they feel that if the nation ceases to exist, her security will be ensured. Or perhaps this insanely large federal agency just hates America.
This is the sad, grim legacy of 9/11, an event which should have provided the glue for a new sense of civic pride. Instead, we now have a self-hating leadership class; a self-hating elite. And today's patriots are forced, not only to fight for our nation's security and prosperity, but the right to be proud of it.
