PLATTEVILLE, Sept. 9 — Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 dawned as a beautiful late summer day, not just in New York and Washington, but in Wisconsin too.
Around 8 a.m. I dropped off our son at day care before I drove from Ripon, where we lived, to Fond du Lac, where I worked in public relations at a Catholic college. On my way out, a mom on her way in with her son, same age as ours, told me to find “a good radio station” because a plane had just hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
I turned on my car and heard that indeed a plane had hit a World Trade Center tower. What I heard wasn’t a repeat of the original report; it was the second plane hitting the second tower. That made everyone correctly conclude that the first plane crash wasn’t an accident.
Each generation has where-were-you-when moments, unforeseen events that change the world in an instant or over time and seem to affect everybody. For my grandparents it was Pearl Harbor. For my parents it was President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. For my generation 9/11 is added to a list that includes the space shuttle Challenger explosion, two Middle East wars, the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, among other events. I feel as though our generation has had quite enough of those kinds of moments, but the world evidently has other ideas.
That 1-year-old I took to day care — and had to monitor what he was watching on TV for days afterward lest he see something on news coverage he shouldn’t (we didn’t worry about his watching “Sesame Street” or Baby Einstein videos) — is now a husband, and he has a brother who is a husband and father and a sister who is a college senior. Obviously we don’t live in Ripon anymore, and I have been back in the print journalism world for 14 years.
New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was quoted shortly after 9/11 as saying he thought the country was not less safe because of the attack, but more safe because it was now obvious where the threats were. I suppose that was true, but it has to be pointed out that threats keep showing up. It’s insane to anyone who lived in the Cold War to hear people prefer the old one-adversary days of the Soviet Union, but the post-Cold War lasted about a year until Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait, and then a decade later came 9/11. And now we have Russia and China plus those who twist Islam for their own demented ends.
Besides all that, Ben Franklin’s observation about trading essential liberty for temporary security has been proven too often to count. Flying is an only-when-necessary experience thanks to how well the airport security process doesn’t work. The Department of Homeland Security was and is a bureaucratic extra layer whose actual contribution to national security is not convincing. The Patriot Act invites government overreach regardless of which party is in charge. And we’ve had such wonderful governmental and political performance (where’s that sarcasm font?) in the Great Recession, COVID, governmental finance (your share of the federal debt is $117,000, by the way) in this century, not the least of which being political candidates who make every election an extinction-level event if their side doesn’t prevail.
I keep reading exhortations for us to unite as a country, usually around the exhorter’s own political worldview. In the same way as with other national tragedies or accomplishments we were united as a country after 9/11 … for a few months. And then business as usual resumed. Given the number of Americans who believe that it would be perfectly OK for politicians they don’t agree with to be murdered, maybe, to quote Joseph de Maistre or paraphrase H.L. Mencken, we are getting the government we deserve.
It will be interesting to see how many 9/11 moments of silence take place before football games Friday. We should honor those who take a job, or serve their country, when that job and that service includes the possibility they won’t return home after their next shift or duty. Even before I became the father of a firefighter and EMT, I was struck about how that morning while everyone else was escaping from the Twin Towers, firefighters, paramedics and police officers were going in — even after the first tower collapsed when everyone going in had to know the likelihood of a repeat occurrence.
Former U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (look him up) said, “We can remember what brings us together as a country and still see the good in each other,” and that we should tell veterans “Never forget,” to show them that “As an American you are in it with them … connected together as grateful fellow Americans.” Crenshaw said “never forget” also reminds us of those who died from all over the world on 9/11, who became victims of a war no one realized we were fighting until two planes crashed into two skyscraprs 17 minutes apart.
