11 September 2023
Twenty-two years after terrorists knocked down the
Trade Towers and set the Pentagon afire, we are less free
I began that day as usual, checking the news on CNN’s website. An image of a smoke pouring from a skyscraper greeted me. Because in those times news websites sometimes were hacked, I turned on my television to confirm what I was seeing. There was no hack. A jumbo airliner had crashed into one of New York’s World Trade Towers in broad daylight.
The press speculated that it was a terrible accident, but I knew instantly it was a terrorist attack. Airliners and other large aircraft do not accidentally crash into a skyscraper when the sun is shining and visibility is unlimited. Within the hour, a second airliner roared into the other tower at 500 mph, proving to everyone that a terrorist attack was underway.
In Kalispell, 2,000 miles and two time zones to the northwest, the day was sunny, clear, and mild. A county road crew was repaving the road in front of my house. The crew waiting for the next truckload of hot asphalt gathered on my front lawn listening to a huge portable radio. I took a few digital photographs of the scene and chatted with the workers. “This means war,” said one.
Flathead road crew listens to news of the attacks.
A third jetliner crashed into the Pentagon, wrecking part of it and setting fires, but most of the building stayed intact and functional.
The White House was spared when Flight 93 after an epic struggle between passengers and hijackers crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard.
President George W. Bush learned of the attacks in Florida, where he reading to children in a classroom photo op. Ashen faced, he returned to Air Force One (the 747) flying west to Omaha. That evening he returned to Washington to deliver to the nation a speech that I thought lacked the right tone and arguments.
In fact, I was so dissatisfied with Bush’s remarks that I wrote and published the speech I thought he should have given.
We no longer live in a country as free and carefree as we lived in on 10 September 2001. We started two wars, one in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq, that claimed more American lives than the 2001 attacks did. Osama Bin Laden, the author of the 2001 attacks, is dead, killed in Pakistan by American commandos. We are still in Iraq, but thanks to Joe Biden, we are out of Afghanistan.
In the speech that Bush should have given, I wrote:
[The terrorists’] ultimate goal was frightening us into surrendering our freedoms in exchange for the illusion of greater safety. Their definition of victory is an America that reacts to today’s attacks not by remaining true to its principles and convictions, but by abandoning its freedoms for the false security of a police state. They hope to panic us into committing national suicide.
To some extent, they succeeded. The Patriot Act, passed in haste without sufficient reasoned debate, led to an America under constant surveillance. Cameras are everywhere. Air travel security is on a wartime footing, and always will be.
The changes in America that Bin Laden provoked leave us less free, less confident, and more willing to seek security and peace of mind by surrendering freedoms that we consider abstract luxuries instead of operational necessities.
We trust each other less. Non-Christians — Muslims, Sikhs; all who are different — are viewed with fear and disdain.
This is the new normal. Americans aged 22 and younger have lived their entire lives in a fragile democracy that is always on the alert for a terrorist attack of some kind. I remember when we did not live in such fear and with such meek compliance with pompous authorities. I remember that kind of America — and I want to get it back.