Horror and Grace and Sept. 11

For many generations of people, the history of their time is divided between "before" and "after". Sometimes that divide is a joyous one: We can only dimly imagine what it was like to be a slave hearing about emancipation. Some of those historical dividing points are ambiguous: The end of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam was bittersweet, a time of both defeat and the end of soldiers' dying. But most of the events that cut through the collective memory of a generation tend to be terrible. There was the world before Pearl Harbor and after it, before the Watts riots and afterwards and - of course - before 9/11 and what has happened since.

The country has changed in a number of ways since that day two years ago and although the specific ways in which people have responded could not perhaps have been seen at the time the two general types of changes that have come about were in fact foretold (we can now see) by the initial responses to the attacks.

Those attacks prompted two sets of indelible images. The first, of course, were those videos of the planes - seemingly impossibly small, like a child's toy almost - cutting through the buildings and then the awful crumpling of the buildings into dust and noise and blood. But the other set of images -not so deeply engraved on our collective consciousness, perhaps - is that of the firefighters and paramedics and police rushing in to save lives and of thousands of people standing in lines around the

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www.socialistalternative.org/justice28/22.html). The position of the federal government and of the Department of Justice in particular is that all of the provisions of the Patriot Act are necessary to prevent the United States from falling prey to another, similarly awful attack. Many Americans agree with this assessment, although the resistance that an additional bill (Patriot Act II, inevitably) has faced in Congress suggests that as the attacks recede more and more people are considering the wisdom of one of Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Much of what has happened since 9/11 represents the painful struggle between the natural desire of all people to be safe with the fervent desire that citizens of every democracy should feel to being free. But, as Koh (168-9) argues, the desire to be safe tends to override all other desires when danger is so obviously present and so obviously lethal. And this desire for safety (and who among us does not want to be safe from attack?) has anti-democratic tendencies. One of the great ironies of this post-9/11 period (which has been remarked upon by a number of different commentator

Category: History - H