North Star Writers Group

September 11 is a day of remembrance. Some call it a day of patriotism. I think it may be best described as our country’s great awakening. After one of the darkest days in our nation’s history, things changed, if only for a while. We were shaken out of some sort of trance, and in hindsight, one ought to ask, what lulled us to sleep the first time and what should we have learned?

Firstly, we should have learned the feeling of mortality. Thousands of American lives ended within minutes, and not because of starvation, disease or old age. It was even distinctly different from Pearl Harbor, a day in which thousands of American soldiers were killed by an enemy seeking power, which is a cause more consistent throughout history. But within hours on a day in 2001, over 3,000 American civilians were killed because of one group’s twisted definition of morality. Aside from how impressively the attacks were conceived and carried out, there was nothing strategic about it. A group of people concluded that citizens of the U.S. deserve death. Evidently, some of our lives were within their reach, and we would be naïve not to think that, to some degree, they still are.

Secondly, we should have learned something very crucial about vengeance. It has an uncanny ability to unite. Essentially, we didn’t choose to be united. The terrorists chose for us. They reminded all Americans what we had in common. We are Americans. And as such, we have the right to defend ourselves against those who would seek to end our lives. Nothing unites a people like a common enemy, especially one that would kill so irrationally.

The third thing we should have learned is that the world sometimes makes no sense. What could possibly make them hate us so much? We never even met, and yet, if all our lives were in their hands, they would clench their fists. Right when our lives were getting comfortable, we got a dose of reality that made no sense. Suddenly, church pews were overflowing on Sunday mornings. People were asking “Why?”, and they were asking God. It is astounding how feelings of confusion and helplessness seem to suggest a higher power. If anything, it would seem like that day should have suggested a great power from below, not above. Either way, we found ourselves confused and helpless in the hands of a world that we have never been able to comprehend.

These are the three things we should have learned: 1) that we are never truly safe from our enemies; 2) that vengeance is a powerfully uniting force; and 3) that no matter how comfortable we may feel with our take on things, the rest of the world is too big to ever make sense of. If we were in a trance, the terrorists should have shaken us out of it.

But then again, perhaps we were shaken into one. I am not sure we ever really learned our lesson. I’m not sure we ever accepted our mortality, that we were ever united by vengeance, or that we learned the fact that we could never hope to make sense of this world, full of violence, suffering, persecution and cultures so different from our own.

I love our country. I am proud of it and the principles for which it stands. We are blessed to live in a country that, more than any other, exemplifies personal freedom. But I fear that our position in the world, which was gained because of the great principles upon which our country was founded, has rendered in us a misleading sense of American entitlement. This is what has lulled us to sleep. Instead of pairing our feelings of outrage with a renewed sense of humility, we paired them with self-righteousness. Instead of, “You can’t do that to us, we’re people too,” most of us said, “You can’t do that to us, we’re Americans.” Instead of feeling grateful for being born into a country of privilege, we developed a sense of superiority.

A war that initially hinged on self-defense has become convoluted by a tainted sense of morality – that we are the good, and they are the evil. Quite frankly, this is just bad foreign policy.

Every nation ought to defend itself against those who would destroy it, but I fear that our country, all the way from the lower class to the White House, has forgotten that this is the reason we got involved in the first place. We don’t owe anyone anything, and we are endowed with no more inalienable rights than anyone else. We are simply blessed citizens of a great country. We don’t deserve our position of privilege in this world, and no one person ever earned it. However, we ought not apologize for it. We ought to be grateful. The problem with our national sense of either privilege or apology is that they seem to affect the way we handle the rest of the world. Even America’s decision to enter World War II ought to have been based on self-defense, not morality. Five years ago, a group of terrorists reminded the world that morality is terrible foreign policy, but I fear that, according to many Americans, our response was in kind.

Only people can save people. A country’s purpose is to defend its own. And until we accept the truth of our humanity – which means we are mortal, unenlightened, just a tiny percentage of the people in this world, and no more or less upright than everyone else – we will never truly understand ourselves, or the way we are seen.

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