Anniversary Number Seven

An
anniversary can be sweet or solemn, but either way, it is only a reverbation. From a distance of 7 years, we can hear whatever we are listening for. We can argue that Sept. 11 changed everything—or nothing.
The country is more united, and less; more fearful and more secure, more serious and more devoted to watching American Idol.

Holding two contradictory ideas in your head was supposed to be a sign of first-rate intelligence. Now it just feels like a vital sign. To say we have changed feels like rewarding the enemy, but to deny it risks losing the knowledge for which we paid a terrible price—knowledge about who we become under pressure, in public and private. People talked about living on a higher plane, with an intensity of fear and faith and gratitude, when it was easy to salute and hard to sleep and nothing was bland or phony or cheap. But we could not live there forever; it was like the day you graduate from high school or your first child is born or your father dies—days of power and insight that grab you for a moment and, when they let you go, leave marks on your skin.
What marks can we see now?

President Bush says great good may come from the evil that struck, but you need a long lens to bring that hope into focus. We resist the idea that we have changed because so much of the change of the past years have felt like damage. Lives have been lost or broken. Whole sectors of the economy are in intensive care. We talk about the need to balance freedom and security, but both have shriveled in the heat of the threat. There seemed to be a spirit of infectious virtue everywhere we turned ; we have since looked from the pulpit to the boardroom to the baseball diamond and wondered if there was an honest man anywhere in sight.
So, having hardened the soft targets and stored some water and a flashlight, we try to move on as though nothing fundamental has been lost, head down the road in our gas-guzzling cars and not mind if there's a checkpoint along the way.

For a while we All were One, stunned, numbed, crushed and inflamed. But the road forked somewhere, dividing those most directly affected from everyone else. It is one thing to choke up when we read the "Portraits of Grief" obituaries in the New York Times, another to wake up every morning knowing there's a pair of ski boots in your hall closet that will never be used again and decide whether this is the day you'll finally take off your wedding ring. Many may have had a burst of spiritual fuel, but that's not the same as having your minister suggest that God must have quite a plan for your life or he wouldn't have saved it, as a pastor told Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last survivor pulled from the hellfire.

On Sept. 10, we were all living in a country with 19 terrorists poised to kill as many of us as possible, but we thought we were safe. From the next day forward, we thought otherwise. We bought gas masks and burned our mail, and flight attendants called in bomb threats to their airlines because they were scared to fly. People in Iowa and Nebraska, began locking their doors, taking their keys out of their cars. Wal-Mart, which can race blankets, batteries and bottled water to any region hit by a hurricane , fire or tornado, ran out of the one thing everyone suddenly needed: a flag.

But at some point it was time to get on a subway or a plane. And that first ride, that first flight, was the first step back to Now. The blood banks had so much blood in the fall, they were throwing it out, but by Christmas some were putting out emergency calls because donations were lower than a year before. There was no baby boom nine months later. The markets survived the attacks, but not the crooks. The diabetics who craved the comfort of sundaes have gone back to watching their diets. The survivors are bickering over the payouts. The city is arguing over memorials. The doors are unlocked again in Iowa and Nebraska but "nothing is ever going to be the same," says a local car dealer. Have we changed? Or just moved on?

The debate now has a natural geography. Washington is on a war footing, unless you call machine-gun squads near the Mall normal. Lower Manhattan has become hallowed ground, like Omaha Beach or Gettysburg. But elsewhere most people say the fear has largely passed or congealed into superstitions.

The Washington Post reports that government experts know that lots of lives might be saved in the next terrorist attack if people had certain basic information: how to seal a room with duct tape or avoid radiation from a dirty bomb. But they don't trust people with the information, the paper quotes an official as saying, because "we're not in the business of terrifying the public." So members of Congress have evacuation routes, but the general population does not, despite the fact that seven years ago the premise that people panic in a crisis was put to the ultimate test, and people passed, with honors.

There are the pragmatic reactions of a deeply pragmatic people determined to change as little as possible because we are so invested in our way of life. In Washington the government is installing 200 cameras around the city to safeguard the monuments to people who safeguarded our freedom.

Whose scales shall we use to balance security and prosperity and freedom?

Because Sept. 11 is still one of a kind, people can make it what they want. The left says it has made us more aware of the need to be both humble and generous at home and abroad. The right is glad we now honor our soldiers and suspect our allies and can finally agree that some values are not just a matter of opinion. The faithful talk of a spiritual revival, even though the pollsters say that moment has passed; if we are on a spiritual journey, it does not necessarily pass through a sanctuary, and clerics from coast to coast must wonder whether they missed an opportunity they never expected to have, when they were flooded with people searching for answers but who, after waiting a few weeks, went looking elsewhere.

The only things scarier than the questions we can't answer are the answers we can't avoid. Somewhere in the back of our minds is the knowledge that stunned us that day—knowledge about how America is seen, about where democracies are vulnerable, about what we are capable of at our very best, what courage, what creativity, what kindness individually and collectively. That knowledge, now framed as memory, still poses a challenge. When we didn't know we had the strength, there was no shame in not using it. But now that we know what we can do, how do we excuse ourselves for falling back into the shallows?

Most of us will be revisiting where we were on 9/11 sometime in the next few days, dragged back by a thousand hours and pages of retrospective and elegy. We will be reminded of the destruction, relive the fury and fight again the battle between the change we value and the change we fear. We're not meant to have fixed everything by each big day; as with New Year's resolutions, anniversaries are a chance to take stock and keep working. And yet each one is important because with each successive one, the memory may fade. Whatever other wars we fight together, this one we each get to fight alone, defending our habits and confidence and freedom against enemies who would destroy them and using as a weapon the skills we have built by doing so. We know more now. If only we can remember that we do.