A Poem tribute by Poet Laureate Billy Collins on the Names on the Ground Zero Memorial, the names read out on every anniversary usually by the survivors of those they lost.
Opinion: We best remember 9/11 by moving beyond it
Opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr. Columnist Yesterday at 5:47 p.m. Washington Post
The primary lesson we should take from the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is to be wary of lessons we think we have learned from traumatic events. Trauma can undermine the clear thinking and calm deliberation big decisions require.
The trauma the nation felt then was amplified by the contrast between our experience of sudden vulnerability and a mood shaped by a long period of relative peace and nearly a decade of roaring prosperity.
Our nation had been on a high of national self-confidence after the collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged talk of a “unipolar world” in which the United States confronted no serious competitors.
And the actual suffering was excruciating. We still mourn the thousands killed at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and on Flight 93 when brave passengers, at the cost of their lives, overcame their hijackers to stop another targeted crash. We remember the firefighters, police officers and other first responders who died or suffered grievous, lasting health problems to save others.
Briefly, we were united as a nation. For some time, partisan politics very nearly disappeared.
Among Democrats, President George W. Bush’s approval rating was just 27 percent in a Gallup survey taken Sept. 7-10, 2001; in less than a week, it soared to 78 percent. It was even higher among independents and Republicans.
But the unity would not last. If the decision to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was broadly popular, the use of 9/11 to justify the invasion of Iraq was not. Americans rallied around the flag when the war in Iraq started, but they had grave doubts going in, and those mushroomed as the war dragged on.
The way Bush administration officials made the case for intervening in Iraq sowed seeds of division that blossomed into today’s rancid politics.
They painted utterly unrealistic portraits of what the war would achieve (“we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Vice President Dick Cheney famously said), and savaged critics in partisan terms. When Bush announced the invasion on March 19, 2003, a sidebar report in the next day’s Post was headlined: “GOP to Hammer Democratic War Critics.”
The years that followed were jarring in other ways. De-industrialization savaged many once-vibrant communities, especially in the Midwest. Economic inequality grew. The financial collapse of 2008 greatly aggravated the damage. The economy recovered, but slowly.
The pre-9/11 sense of American invincibility and that too-brief interlude after the onslaught when it felt like we were all in this together gave way to bitterness, division and new doubts about the country’s capacities.
This is why we should not be surprised by a Post-ABC News poll this week that found 46 percent of Americans say that the events of Sept. 11 changed the country for the worse while only 33 percent said they changed it for the better.
The contrast with responses to the same question in September 2002 could hardly be starker. Back then, 55 percent said the country had changed for the better, only 27 percent for the worse. We had not gone to Iraq yet, and we were still basking in the selflessness of our 9/11 heroes.
There is, I think, wisdom in the country’s intuitions, then and now. As we reach a milestone anniversary of the attacks, we should never forget those whose lives were lost. And if there is one aspect of the spirit of 9/11 that should remain with us, it is the devotion to selfless service that inspired our country two decades ago and remains a model for what patriotism should look like.
But in many other ways, we need to move beyond 9/11 — beyond the hubris that made us think we could remake the world by force, beyond the ever-present temptation to use a catastrophe to justify projects already in mind before disaster struck.
What we did right after 9/11 was inspired not by grandiose plans but by a painstaking response to more ordinary failures: the failure to understand and act upon available intelligence, the lack of cooperation among agencies charged with keeping us safe, the inability to grasp how much damage could be inflicted by enemies far less powerful than us. Our systems are better for acknowledging these shortcomings, and our imaginations are more alive to the threats.
What we don’t need and shouldn’t want are bombastic declarations of American purpose on Sept. 11, 2021. Far better would be sober remembrances of the heroes and the fallen; realistic assessments of what it will take to protect our people; and a pledge not to remain mired in the feelings, impulses and mistakes that followed a tragic moment. All this, and prayers that we might never again confront a misfortune of this sort.
View 3 more stories Opinion by E.J. DionneE.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post. He is a professor at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a frequent commentator for NPR and MSNBC. His latest book is “Code Red: How Progressives and Moderates Can Unite to Save Our Country.” Twitter
Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of September 11
In 2005, in partnership with the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, StoryCorps launched the September 11 Initiative. The goal of the project is to record at least one story commemorating each life lost during the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center Bombing.
This year, in recognition of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, StoryCorps is releasing two new animated shorts highlighting the voices of those impacted by this tragedy, “September 12th” and “Father Mychal’s Blessing.” These new animations are part of a rich body of stories from the September 11th Initiative, which includes conversations with family members, colleagues, and friends who wish to commemorate the events of September 11.
These StoryCorps interviews are archived in the StoryCorps Archive in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, and are also part of a special collection at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum.
On 9/11, Father Mychal Judge, beloved chaplain to the NYC Fire Department, was killed during the attack on the World Trade Center while offering spiritual support, becoming the first certified fatality of the 9/11 attacks. His friend, Father Michael Duffy, read the sermon at his funeral. He remembers Father Mychal’s endearing mannerisms, constant positivity, and profound impact on everyone he knew. Read the full transcript here.
On 9/11, Vaughn Allex checked in two passengers arriving late for their flight. He learned later that they were two of the hijackers of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. He recalls the toll it took on him. Read the full transcript here.
We will also be releasing a two-part podcast episode that shares first-hand reflections on 9/11. The first part, a collaboration with Consider This, looks at the lasting toll of 9/11 on U.S. civilians, U.S. veterans, and Afghan citizens, and will be published on Friday, September 10. Part two will go live on 9/11. Subscribe to the StoryCorps podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Talat Hamdani remembers her son, an EMT and NYPD cadet who died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 as a first responder and was wrongfully accused of having terrorist links. Read the full transcript here.
When Richie Pecorella met Karen Juday, she captured his heart and changed his life. They were engaged when she was killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Read the full transcript here.
The late John Vigiano Sr., a retired FDNY captain, honors his sons — John Jr., also a firefighter, and Joe, a police detective — who were killed while saving others on September 11, 2001. Read the full transcript here.
Retired NYC Fire Chief Albert Petrocelli died from COVID-19 nearly two decades after losing his youngest son, Mark, on September 11, 2001. Before he passed, Chief Petrocelli and his wife, Ginger, sat down to remember the last time they saw their son. Read the full transcript here.STORY“PEOPLE SAW ONLY A TURBAN AND A BEARD.”3:14
Rana and Harjit Sodhi remember their brother, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man who was killed in the first hate crime following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Read the full transcript here.
Monique Ferrer remembers the last time she spoke with her ex-husband, Michael Trinidad, on September 11, 2001, when he called her from the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower to say goodbye. Read the full transcript here.
From the Archive: More Stories of September 11
To hear more stories related to September 11, visit our Archive and search for the keyword “9/11”.
Interview partners Dawn Ennis and Amy Weinstein talk about Dawn’s experience as a producer on CBS This Morning on the morning of September 11, 2001. Dawn describes the exact moment when newsrooms found out that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and she shares her feelings regarding the reactions that New Yorkers had after the attack. Read the full transcript here.
Sharon Watts shares the story of her relationship with her ex-fiance Captain Patrick Brown of the FDNY, who passed away during the 9/11 attacks. Sharon affectionately recollects stories and reveals that soon after Patrick passed away, Sharon compiled stories and journals about his life to create a book. Read the full transcript here.
Rescue medical firefighter, Maria “Terry” Dominguez talks with her nephew Phillip Cassanova about her deployment with the USSR during the 9/11 attacks and shares her feelings about the aftermath of the tragedy while reflecting on the importance of loved ones. Phillip describes being 10 years old when the attack occurred and finding out in his 5th grade classroom. Read the full transcript here.
Michael Doyle, along with StoryCorps facilitator Virginia Lora, recounts finding out that the attacks had occurred while he was riding the Q train over lower Manhattan. Read the full transcript here.
Spouses Diane Davis and Leo McKenna discuss their memories of 9/11, when 7,000 plane passengers were forced to land in the town of Gander, Newfoundland, Canada following the attacks in New York City. Diane, a third grade teacher at the time, remembers preparing the schools to house the passengers. Leo recalls the commotion that occurred due to the sudden landing of the passengers. Read the full transcript here.
Seth Gilman, who was a rescue worker during 9/11, speaks with his mother Lois Gilman about assisting the New York City police and witnessing the loss of many lives on that day. He describes his journey to becoming a teacher, and the unity that he saw during a difficult moment in history. Read the full transcript here.
Nadine (Nai’a) Newlight tells StoryCorps facilitator Eloise Melzer about how close she was to being at World Trade Center on 9/11. She describes her love for the World Trade Center and her experience as a tour guide there. Read the full transcript here.
Colleagues and close friends Brian Muldowney and B. Kelly Hallman discuss the loss of Muldowney’s brother, Richard Muldowney Jr., a fellow firefighter who passed away saving people on 9/11. Brian describes going down to the World Trade Center with his brother’s firehouse to help and discusses how his brother’s legacy affects his work. Read the full transcript here.
Michael Fabiano, a Deputy Controller for NY/NJ Port Authority, speaks with Sarah Geis about his experience being on the 69th floor of Tower 1 when the first plane attacked. He describes his escape from the building and his efforts to help bring to safety a colleague, John Ambrosio, who was wheelchair bound. Read the full transcript here.
On the morning of 9/11 as she watched the planes crash, Kris Gould tried to get in contact with a friend who worked on the 99th floor of Tower 1. She and her colleague Scott Accord talk about the vibe that fell over the city the day after the attacks occurred. Read the full transcript here.
Share your story. StoryCorps Connect makes it possible to interview a loved one remotely and then upload it to the StoryCorps Archive at the Library of Congress. Learn more at StoryCorpsConnect.org.
More Americans say 9/11 changed U.S. for worse than better, Post-ABC poll finds
By Scott Clement Polling director Yesterday at 6:00 a.m.
Americans increasingly say the events of Sept. 11, 2001, had a more negative than positive impact on the country, and predictions for the pandemic’s long-term impact are even more downbeat, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Saturday, more than 8 in 10 Americans say those events changed the country in a lasting way. Nearly half (46 percent) say the events of 9/11 changed the country for the worse, while 33 percent say they changed the country for the better.
That represents a shift from 10 years ago when Americans were roughly divided on this question, and it marks an even larger swing from the first anniversary of the attacks in 2002. Back then, 55 percent said the country had changed for the better.
Americans’ perceptions of safety from terrorist attacks are also at a low ebb, with 49 percent saying the country is safer from terrorism today than before 9/11 — one percentage point from the record low of 48 percent reached in 2010, and down from 64 percent in September 2011, four months after Osama bin Laden was killed.
Partisans differ on whether the U.S. is safer from terrorism today than before 9/11, with 57 percent of Democrats saying it is, while 54 percent of Republicans say it’s less safe. Independents are closer to Democrats on this question, saying by 52 percent to 38 percent that the U.S. is safer rather than less safe.
The Post-ABC poll also finds about 8 in 10 Americans think the coronavirus pandemic will change the country in a lasting way, with more than twice as many expecting it to change for the worse rather than better, 50 percent vs. 21 percent.
Pessimism about the pandemic’s impact is widespread, though it peaks on the ideological right. Conservatives are among the most concerned groups, with 62 percent saying they expect the pandemic to change the country for the worse, compared with 47 percent of moderates and 44 percent of liberals. Republicans also are more likely than Democrats to predict the pandemic will make the country worse (56 percent vs. 42 percent).
Opposition to mask requirements and other pandemic restrictions likely explains part of the negative outlook among conservatives and Republicans. Among the roughly 6 in 10 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who oppose school mask mandates, 69 percent believe the pandemic will change the country for the worse, compared with 48 percent of Republicans who support mask requirements.
The ideological split is reversed in views of the 9/11 attacks, with nearly 6 in 10 liberals saying the events changed the country for the worse (59 percent), compared with 44 percent of moderates and 45 percent of conservatives. Liberals have grown much more negative on this question since 2011, when 42 percent said the attacks changed the country for the worse.
The latest Post-ABC poll overlapped the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan along with the evacuation of more than 120,000 Americans and allies in just over two weeks. In results released Friday, 36 percent of Americans said the Afghan war was worth fighting, while 54 percent say it was not. Those who say the war was not worth fighting are also more likely to say Sept. 11, 2001, changed the U.S. for the worse (53 percent), compared with those who say it was worth fighting (37 percent).
The Post-ABC poll was conducted by telephone Aug. 29-Sept. 1 among a random national sample of 1,006 adults, with 75 percent reached on cellphone and 25 percent on landline. Overall results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.1.6k CommentsGift Article
By Scott ClementScott Clement is the polling director for The Washington Post, conducting national and local polls about politics, elections and social issues. He began his career with the ABC News Polling Unit and came to The Post in 2011 after conducting surveys with the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project. Twitter
The September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance (9/11 Day), is a chance to help others in tribute to those killed and injured on September 11, 2001, first responders, and the countless others who serve to defend the nation’s freedom at home and around the globe.
September 11, 2021, is the 20th Anniversary of that tragic day. Join AmeriCorps on 9/11 Day— step forward to serve in a remarkable spirit of unity, honor, and compassion.
Remember, even a small act of service is a giant act of patriotism. “Service is a fitting way to start to heal, unite, and rebuild this country we love.”/ President Joe Biden
Find a volunteer opportunity
Use the AmeriCorps Volunteer Search, powered by VolunteerMatch, to find an opportunity near you through one of these organizations: AmeriCorps, Idealist, California Volunteers, MENTOR, Volunteer.gov (National Park Service), and VolunteerMatch. For volunteer opportunities for September 11, please enter #911 in the search box.
Essay by Carlos Lozada. Illustrations by Patrik Svensson. Updated Sept. 3 at 6:00 a.m.Originally published Sept. 3, 2021
Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report — long after readers learn of the origins and objectives of al-Qaeda, past the warnings ignored by consecutive administrations, through the litany of institutional failures that allowed terrorists to hijack four commercial airliners — the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.
“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”Story continues below advertisement
This affirmation of American idealism is one of the document’s more opinionated moments. Looking back, it’s also among the most ignored.
Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror. Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.
Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand. The betrayal of America’s professed principles was the friendly fire of the war on terror. In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.
It was an emergency, yes, that’s understood. But that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.
It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority. And it has lasted long. The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.
“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.
The literature of 9/11 also considers Osama bin Laden’s varied aspirations for the attacks and his shifting visions of that aftermath. He originally imagined America as weak and easily panicked, retreating from the world — in particular from the Middle East — as soon as its troops began dying. But bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity. “We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”
Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.
I.
“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials in “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.” For a country still basking in its post-Cold War glow, it all seemed so far away, even as al-Qaeda’s strikes — on the World Trade Center in 1993, on U.S. Embassies in 1998, on the USS Cole in 2000 — grew bolder. This was American complacency, mixed with denial.
The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass. Their starting points vary. Wright dwells on the influence of Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb, whose mid-20th-century sojourn in the United States animated his vision of a clash between Islam and modernity, and whose work would inspire future jihadists. In “Ghost Wars,” Coll laments America’s abandonment of Afghanistan once it ceased serving as a proxy battlefield against Moscow.
In “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden,” Peter Bergen stresses the moment bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed first pitched him on the planes plot. And the 9/11 Commission lingers on bin Laden’s declarations of war against the United States, particularly his 1998 fatwa calling it “the individual duty for every Muslim” to murder Americans “in any country in which it is possible.”
Yet these early works also make clear that the road to 9/11 featured plenty of billboards warning of the likely destination. A Presidential Daily Brief item on Aug. 6, 2001, titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US” became infamous in 9/11 lore, yet the commission report notes that it was the 36th PDB relating to bin Laden or al-Qaeda that year alone. (“All right. You’ve covered your ass now,” Bush reportedly sneered at the briefer.) Both the FBI and the CIA produced classified warnings on terrorist threats in the mid-1990s, Coll writes, including a particularly precise National Intelligence Estimate. “Several targets are especially at risk: national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol, and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street,” it stated. “We assess that civil aviation will figure prominently among possible terrorist targets in the United States.” Some of the admonitions scattered throughout the 9/11 literature are too over-the-top even for a movie script: There’s the exasperated State Department official complaining about Defense Department inaction (“Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”), and the earnest FBI supervisor in Minneapolis warning a skeptical agent in Washington about suspected terrorism activity, insisting that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center.”
In these books, everyone is warning everyone else. Bergen emphasizes that a young intelligence analyst in the State Department, Gina Bennett, wrote the first classified memo warning about bin Laden in 1993. Pockets within the FBI and the CIA obsess over bin Laden while regarding one another as rivals. On his way out, President Bill Clinton warns Bush. Outgoing national security adviser Sandy Berger warns his successor, Condoleezza Rice. And White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, as he reminds incessantly in his 2004 memoir, “Against All Enemies,” warns anyone who will listen and many who will not.
With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings, emphasizing that intelligence collection on al-Qaeda was hampered by the “institutional warfare” between the CIA and the FBI, two agencies that by all accounts were not on speaking terms. Coll writes that Clinton regarded bin Laden as “an isolated fanatic, flailing dangerously but quixotically against the forces of global progress,” whereas the Bush team was fixated on great-power politics, missile defense and China.
Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”
The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.
In the 11th chapter of the 9/11 Commission report, just before all the recommendations for reforms in domestic and foreign policy, the authors get philosophical, pondering how hindsight had affected their views of Sept. 11, 2001. “As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”
It’s a commendable attitude, one that helps readers understand what the attacks felt like in real time and why authorities responded as they did. But that approach also keeps the day trapped in the past, safely distant. Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.
When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it. The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror. In Ackerman’s vivid telling — his prose can be hyperbolic, even if his arguments are not — the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity. “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”
Both Ackerman and Greenberg point to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones. It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”
This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.Story continues below advertisement
There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.” The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.” There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.
The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated. Trump was a disruptive force in American life, but there was much continuity there, too. “A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”
In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.
Yet the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here. More Americans today are concerned about domestic extremism than foreign terrorism, and on Jan. 6, 2021, our own citizens assaulted the Capitol building that al-Qaeda hoped to strike on Sept. 11, 2001. Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.
In “The Forever War,” Dexter Filkins describes a nation in which “something had broken fundamentally after so many years of war . . . there had been some kind of primal dislocation between cause and effect, a numbness wholly understandable, necessary even, given the pain.” He was writing of Afghanistan, but his words could double as an interpretation of the United States over the past two decades. Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.
This summer, on a lark, I took a course on poetry geared toward Christian leaders. Twelve of us met over Zoom to read poems and discuss the intersection of our faith, vocations and poetry.
We compared George Herbert’s “Prayer” to Christian Wiman’s “Prayer.” We discussed Langston Hughes’s “Island,” Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel” and Scott Cairns’s “Musée” to examine suffering and the problem of evil. We read about Philip Larkin’s fear of death and what he sees as the failures of religious belief in his poem “Aubade.” It was my favorite part of the summer.
In our first class, we took turns sharing what drew us to spend time with poetry. I clumsily tried to explain my longing for verse: I hunger for a transcendent reality — the good, the true, the beautiful, those things which somehow lie beyond mere argument. Yet often, as a writer, a pastor and simply a person online, I find that my life is dominated by debate, controversy and near strangers in shouting matches about politics or church doctrine. This past year in particular was marked by vitriol and divisiveness. I am exhausted by the rancor.
In this weary and vulnerable place, poetry whispers of truths that cannot be confined to mere rationality or experience. In a seemingly wrecked world, I’m drawn to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Autumn” and recall that “there is One who holds this falling/Infinitely softly in His hands.” When the scriptures feel stale, James Weldon Johnson preaches through “The Prodigal Son” and I hear the old parable anew. On tired Sundays, I collapse into Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poems and find rest.
I’m not alone in my interest in this ancient art form. Poetry seems to be making a comeback. According to a 2018 survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of adults who read poetry nearly doubled in five years, marking the highest number on record for the last 15 years. The poet Amanda Gorman stole the show at this year’s presidential inauguration, and her collection “The Hill We Climb” topped Amazon’s best-seller list.
There is not a simple or singular reason for this resurgence. But I think a particular gift of poetry for our moment is that good poems reclaim the power and grace of words.
Words seem ubiquitous now. We carry a world of words with us every moment in our smartphones. We interact with our family and friends through the written word in emails, texts and Facebook posts. But with our newfound ability to broadcast any words we want, at any moment, we can cheapen them.
“Like any other life-sustaining resource,” Marilyn Chandler McEntyre writes in her book “Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies,” “language can be depleted, polluted, contaminated, eroded and filled with artificial stimulants.” She argues that language needs to be rescued and restored, and points us to the practice of reading and writing poetry as one way of doing so. Poems, she says, “train and exercise the imagination” to “wage peace” because “the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.”
Indeed, in our age of social media, words are often used as weapons. Poetry instead treats words with care. They are slowly fashioned into lanterns — things that can illuminate and guide. Debate certainly matters. Arguments matter. But when the urgent controversies of the day seem like all there is to say about life and death or love or God, poetry reminds me of those mysterious truths that can’t be reduced solely to linear thought.
Poetry itself can engage in smart debate, of course. Yet even didactic poetry — poetry that makes an argument — does so in a more creative, meticulous and compelling way than we usually see in our heated public discourse.
Another reason that I think we are drawn to poetry: Poems slow us down. My summer poetry class teacher, Abram Van Engen, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, reminded me that poetry is the “art of paying attention.” In an age when our attention is commodified, when corporations make money from capturing our gaze and holding it for as long as possible, many of us feel overwhelmed by the notifications, busyness and loudness of our lives. Poetry calls us back to notice and attend to the embodied world around us and to our internal lives.
In this way, poetry is like prayer, a comparison many have made. Both poetry and prayer remind us that there is more to say about reality than can be said in words though, in both, we use words to try to glimpse what is beyond words. And they both make space to name our deepest longings, lamentations, and loves. Perhaps this is why the poetry of the Psalms became the first prayer book of the church.
I am trying to take up more poetry reading in my daily life. Reading new poems can be intimidating, but I figure that the only way to get poetry really wrong is to avoid it altogether. It helps that poetry is often short and quick to read so I fit it into the corners of my day — a few minutes in bed at night or in the lull of a Saturday afternoon.
During the past school year, with my kids home because of Covid precautions, we would pile books of poetry on our table once a week (Shel Silverstein, Shakespeare, Nikki Grimes, Emily Dickinson), eat cookies, and read poetry aloud. I now try to always keep some books of verse around.
In one of my very favorite poems, “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes of a beauty that is “past change.” In this world where our political, technological and societal landscape shifts at breakneck speed, many of us still quietly yearn for a beauty beyond change. Poetry stands then as a kind of collective cry beckoning us beyond that which even our best words can say.
Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
Weary of turmoil and division, most teens still voice faith in future, Post-Ipsos poll finds
By Sydney Trent and Emily Guskin Updated Aug. 25 at 8:00 a.m. Originally published Aug. 25, 2021228
Sophia Grigsby watched with horrified amazement as insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, defiling the halls of power in a violent attempt to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president.
The 16-year-old from rural Minnesota wondered, fleetingly, if she had been naive in believing that the protests last summer following the murder of George Floyd had truly marked a turning point. Yet even as the televised spectacle confirmed her belief in the rising dangers of white supremacy — some of the rioters were carrying Confederate flags — Grigsby’s optimism won out.
“Even with the murder of George Floyd, I’m finding people have become so much more aware,” said Grigsby, who starts her junior year of high school in St. Peter, Minn., this month. “While our country is really divided, I think that part of that division is because of that newfound awareness.”
Despite some difficulties as a mixed-race student, including oncefiling a legal complaint againsther school district after it failed to stop classmates from hurling racial slurs at her, Grigsby is also optimistic about her own life. She sees herself graduating from college, meeting her husband in medical school and raising two children — “a boy and a girl, twins,” she hopes — all the while most likely becoming rich.Story continues below advertisement
Grigsby’s largely upbeat attitude about the future, combined with a world-weary realism that seems mature beyond her years, is echoed in the findings of a nationalWashington Post-Ipsos poll of teens ages 14 to 18.
While still hopeful about what lies ahead, many teens do not view the current moment so favorably. Fifty-one percent say that now is a bad time to be growing up, compared with 31 percent who answered that way 16 years ago, in a poll of teens conducted by The Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. Their parents are even more negative, with more than 6 in 10 saying it’s a bad time for teenagers to be growing up.
These young Americans, who are coming of age amid a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, political and social unrest, growing economic inequality and rising crime, are keenly aware of the country’s problems. Majorities view political divisions, racial discrimination, the cost of health care and gun violence as “major threats” to their generation, according to the new Post-Ipsos poll. Nearly half also rank climate change as a major threat.
Some are already trying to make a difference. Heily DeJesus, who lives in Lebanon, Pa., said she dashed from her brother’s high school graduation to a Black Lives Matter protest, where they all took a knee for a selfie as her brother raised his fist in the air.
“It felt great to know that we’re a part of making a change for the world,” she remembered. “Even if it’s a small town, we’re still making a change.”
The survey of 1,349 teens was conducted online in May and June primarily through Ipsos’s randomly recruited panel of U.S. households. Overall results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, and the relatively large sample allows comparison of White, Black, Hispanic and Asian teens.
These young people are part of what is likely the most diverse cohort in the nation’s history.New Census Bureau data shows that the country’s under-18 population is majority-minority for the first time, with White children making up 47.3 percent of that age group compared with 53.5 percent in 2010. Their childhoods have been marked by racial justice protests and a growing societal acceptance of LGBTQ people. Most also perceive significant discrimination against a wide range of groups in American society. Black and transgender people topped the list, with about 6 in 10 teens saying Black people are treated unfairly very or somewhat often and an almost equal share saying the same thing about transgender people.
Montgomery County announced Wednesday that it is requiring county employees to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or get tested regularly, the latest area government to impose such a mandate for their workers amid a surge of new cases mostly infecting the unvaccinated.
All county government employees will have to submit proof of vaccination by Sept. 18 or face having to take regular coronavirus tests, County Executive Marc Elrich (D) said in a news conference Wednesday.
The weekly average number of cases per 100,000 residents is up most starkly in the region in Virginia, where the figure reached 32 as of Wednesday, compared with six a month ago. In D.C., the figure was 24 as of Wednesday and seven a month ago, and Maryland was at 17 as of Wednesday compared with four a month ago, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Hospitalizations are up, too, with 1,376 covid-19 patients hospitalized in Virginia compared with 400 a month ago. In Maryland, the number is 849, compared with 318 in late July, and in D.C., it was 143 vs. 52 a month ago, federal data shows.
Hospitals have not yet reached capacity but are experiencing a surge in demand. The last time this many people were hospitalized in D.C. and Maryland was in May, but hospitals there still have fewer covid-19 patients than they did at the peak of the pandemic in December and January. Virginia last reached today’s numbers in March.
Public health officials have said vaccines are their best tool against the pandemic, and more governments and private employers are issuing mandates requiring their employees to get vaccinated.
Elrich said county officials had been in negotiations with union leaders for several weeks and agreed on final details for the vaccination-or-testing requirement this week.
Now that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has full federal approval, he urged other employers and businesses in the county to require vaccinations among staff or patrons, adding that he thinks it can serve as a strong incentive to the segment of the county’s 1 million eligible residents who have yet to get a shot.
Sixty-six percent of Montgomery County residents are fully vaccinated — the second most in the state, behind only Howard County, which has 70 percent. About 50 percent are fully vaccinated in Prince George’s County, and 58 percent are in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County, state data shows.
According to The Post’s tracker, about 57 percent of D.C. and Virginia residents are fully vaccinated compared with 61 percent of Maryland residents.
Across the nation and region, however, the vast majority of infections, hospitalizations and deaths are occurring in the unvaccinated.
“It’s the unvaccinated people who stand as our largest obstacle to getting back to normal,” Elrich said.
Coronavirus infections in Montgomery have climbed in recent weeks, with a seven-day average of 140 on Wednesday, compared with a low of six in June. But Montgomery County Health Officer Travis Gayles said it’s noteworthy that covid-related hospitalizations and deaths have not surged to the same extent as cases.
“This is encouraging news that hopefully we’ll be able to blunt the impact of the delta variant,” Gayles said.
The Loudoun County Health Department and public schools will open a new vaccination site at Sterling Elementary School on Sept. 4. It will be open every Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment for now. Vaccinations are open to anyone 12 or older and are free.
The new location replaces the site at the Dulles Town Center, which will close permanently on Sept. 3.
“We are committed to being a COVID-19 vaccine provider for those unable to obtain vaccine through their medical provider or neighborhood pharmacy,” said Loudoun County Health Director David Goodfriend.
In another sign the virus surge is driving outbreaks, the Virginia Department of Health on Wednesday reinstated regular reporting of coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, camps, day-care centers and pre-K, as well as schools including K-12, colleges and universities. The dashboard names the facility and the number of cases and deaths.
The biggest outbreak in the state is at an assisted-living facility in Halifax, where there have been 40 cases and at least one death, state data shows. There are multiple smaller outbreaks in Henrico and Chesterfield counties outside Richmond, and Hampton and Chesapeake in the Hampton Roads region.
Antonio Olivo and Jacqueline Dupree contributed to this report.
Posts by Paul Costello1
