Everyone Remembers Where They Were On 9/11
Dear Friends,
On the night of 9/11, I happened to be sleeping soundly and very comfortably on an overnight train trip—“The Spirit of the Outback”through Western Queensland Australia, ending in the sleepy—and aptly-named—town of Longreach. This was when, due to a 13-hour time difference, the attack occurred. Thus I didn’t learn of it until a full 12 hours after its occurrence. So I lack the vivid real-time memories of it possessed by nearly all New Yorkers, and indeed by most Americans. I didn’t even get to see any television coverage (and then only 30 minutes on CNN) of it and its immediate aftermath until I spent the following night at a rustic motel in remote western Queensland.
But I understood what a shock it was to every NYC resident—and indeed to the whole country. America had made it through all of WW II without suffering a single direct attack on what we now disturbingly call “the Homeland.” With 9/11, Americans got—for the first time—a relatively small taste of what the citizens of London, Coventry, Rotterdam and Warsaw (and I could add Hamburg, Berlin and Tokyo) had experienced night after night for months during WW II.
If one were to revisit accounts of the 9/11 act of terrorism written right after its occurrence, you would find a great deal of speculation as to when the next such attack might happen. But I doubt that any commentator—even the most perceptive—predicted that not even one remotely similar attack would occur over the next 20+ years.
But that is what has happened, with the threat of Islamic terrorism, indeed any other kind of foreign attack, having diminished to the vanishing point. I further doubt that anyone back then predicted, after the shock of 9/11, that the danger to our society would now be coming almost exclusively from homegrown terrorists, almost entirely those on the political Right. Nor might anyone have surmised that those anti-democracy forces would have a fearless champion in a former President of the United States—one who shockingly is seen as having a pretty fair chance of being returned to office.
But that is the case unless we all practice—each in our own way—eternal vigilance in the face of those who would severely damage, if not outright destroy, our 234-year old democracy. While I regard the return of Trump or some form of Trumpism as unlikely, I realize it is nowhere close to impossible. My guess is that it’s re-emergence would require the decent, democracy-loving majority of Americans to be asleep at the switch, as Hillary Clinton was in 2016, with disastrous—if not yet tragic—results.
Preventing its reoccurrence is up to all of us non-Kool Aid drinkers
Roger
