As we pay tribute to the 2,977 lives tragically lost on September 11, 2001 -- to the men, women and children of more than 90 nations who died in Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA -- we rightfully remember the selfless heroes of that day and the days that followed, among them the first responders who risked and gave their lives to save others, the passengers on Flight 93 who forced their plane to crash rather than have it crash into the Capitol, the workers on "the pile" and at the Pentagon, and the many anonymous people who helped strangers during the chaotic horror.
At the same time, we must also be willing to take a clear, hard look at what the death and horror of that day has contributed to 20 years later. The Atlantic's Garrett Graff has a must- read article about the terrible miscalculations that were made in the wake of 9/11, and why we're where we are today. Here's a snippet:
As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, I cannot escape this sad conclusion: The United States—as both a government and a nation—got nearly everything about our response wrong, on the big issues and the little ones. The GWOT yielded two crucial triumphs: The core al-Qaeda group never again attacked the American homeland, and bin Laden, its leader, was hunted down and killed in a stunningly successful secret mission a decade after the attacks. But the U.S. defined its goals far more expansively, and by almost any other measure, the War on Terror has weakened the nation—leaving Americans more afraid, less free, more morally compromised, and more alone in the world. A day that initially created an unparalleled sense of unity among Americans has become the backdrop for ever-widening political polarization.
The nation’s failures began in the first hours of the attacks and continue to the present day. Seeing how and when we went wrong is easy in hindsight. What’s much harder to understand is how—if at all—we can make things right.
We would be hard pressed to say that things can be made right after 20 years of blunders, fear- mongering and divide- and- conquer politics. 9/11 certainly wasn't the beginning of our troubles, the seeds of which were planted in the decades before. As has been said, we went on a mission to bring American- style democracy to the Middle East and ended up with our own democracy tattered and in peril as we simultaneously struggle to fight a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Graff concludes,
...We are confronting the current crisis with little of the hope, goodwill, and unity that 9/11 initially created, and that reality is inseparable from the fear and suspicion that came to dominate America’s reaction to the 2001 attacks—and yielded a long succession of tragic consequences, cynical choices, and poisonous politics. Looking back after two decades, I can’t escape the conclusion that the enemy we ended up fighting after 9/11 was ourselves.
And the battle rages on.
