A Different World

(First, an apology. Due to the long Labor Day weekend and a minor hand injury that has me typing with 9 fingers, I have not been posting. And, as we shall be in the great Pacific Northwest from Sept. 8th until the 12th, this might be the only post until the middle of next week. But please stop by and see TONE again. Thanks.)

How many times over the past five years have we heard that the world changed on 9/11? But is it true? Was it ever true?

Almost as soon as it became clear who had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I said to myself--and those few who were polite enough to listen--that the terrorists could never defeat the United States. The only real threat to the nation came from ourselves.

Terrible as the losses on 9/11 were, they did not seriously damage the fabric of the United States. (Compare the cost of Sept. 11 with the toll that a Soviet Union with only a little over half of the current US population suffered in WWII: At least 5 times as many people killed every single day during the war as we lost on 9/11.) Most of the real harm has been self-inflicted.

As became all too clear in the past few years, some Americans seem bound and determined to fight against what I thought this nation was all about: FDR's Four Freedoms, democracy, the sense that we are all in this together. For dark months, it seemed that those whose view of freedom was, in Jim Croce's words, "let him live in freedom/if he lives like me," would prevail. Yet like a great ship that has fought through a storm, staggered and sometimes thrown off course, the nation seems to be coming back to where she should be. True, most of the criticism that has mounted around the President, his administration and his party is aimed simply at their incompetence rather than their cramped and twisted view of what America is all about. Yet people who realize that the policies are not working are coming to question the principles on which those policies were built.

It is not yet clear that the nation is freeing itself from the tyranny--for that is what it is--of the Right: Democrats could still fail to grasp the opportunity that is being held out to them this year. Osama bin Laden--George W. Bush's great political ally--could pull off an act of terrorism that moves swing voters back to Republicans (although now there is an equal risk that they will desert the party in droves if that happens). An ineffective Democratic candidate in 2008 could prolong Republican tenancy in the White House. Still, it seems to me that the worst is over--that the great ship is headed toward a clear sky and a smoother sea.