A new chapter in American history began on September 11, 2001. Never again will we feel the same sense of national security or territorial invulnerability that just the day before we essentially took for granted. In time our collective red-hot nerve endings — so frayed at the moment by the horrific events that exploded in real time before our eyes — will cool down; but it will be, at best, ages before we lose our heightened levels of anxiety. No US citizen will ever get on a plane again without being seriously scrutinized — an ever-present reminder of what can happen and, on Tuesday, did happen. So many who go to work each day in office towers or federal buildings of all shapes — including the single greatest symbol of our national security, the Pentagon — will always have somewhere in the recesses of their memories images of kamikaze planes falling into their workplaces from the sky. We’re cursed with images of destruction and death within our borders — images of a magnitude never before contemplated by any but fiction writers and filmmakers. Simply said, our national psyche is forever changed.
Where that change will lead is the most important question the nation must answer in the weeks and months ahead. What took place on Tuesday exceeds in scale even the loss and destruction at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 — the " day of infamy " when approximately 2500 people were sent to their deaths. Such an event instantly brings the American people together. Shock, anger, desire for retribution and justice — these feelings hit first and hit hard. And there is little doubt that sooner or later the perpetrators and their supporters will be known and dealt with. (Even as this is being written, the early evidence leads to the Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden.) But that will only salve a wound that will continue to bleed and fester before scabbing up and creating the ugliest of scars.
As the names of the many thousands of victims become known; as some of us come to terms with horrible personal loss (thus far, I’ve learned that three people I knew were on the Boston flights); as we see victims’ devastated husbands, wives, children, and parents interviewed and we witness funeral after funeral — those of us not directly affected will personalize these losses. We will think of the possibility that we, or someone in our immediate family, might have been on one of those ill-fated planes — a child going back to school or a grandchild off on a trip to visit grandparents. But even more frightening will be the thought that at any time in the future it could happen again. And with that fear will come the hardening of our attitude and the inevitable question: What can we do to make certain that it can’t and won’t ever happen again?
Herein lies the great challenge to the future of our democracy. Extreme measures to shut down our country — not only tightened airport security but other draconian laws designed to ferret out or scare off those whose intentions may be illegitimate or worse — cannot even begin to plug the security holes that our free society has consciously created. More important, they can’t do so without forcing us to pay a significant price monetarily, physically, and psychically. They can’t do so without forcing us to relinquish the very freedoms that distinguish us from the rest of the world. And even with such extreme measures in place, there can, in fact, be no assurance that an evil act — equal to or greater than the one that just assaulted every fiber of our safety — will not be committed again.
Yet it is certain that many well-intentioned people, leaders and citizens alike, will call for such measures. The temptation will indeed be great to accede to those who insist on ceding our civil rights to the need for security. We will be asked to yield to restrictions on our freedom to travel, to enter public buildings and monuments. We will be asked to give government broader authority to invade our privacy — to look up our records, listen in on our conversations, read our e-mail, and otherwise circumscribe our liberties. In recent years — even in the absence of massive trauma — the political right has mounted a continuous assault to restrict or remove many of our constitutionally guaranteed rights. Rights such as habeas corpus and protection from unwarranted search and seizure have been nearly obliterated in the name of " catching the bad guys. " Indeed, it took a recent US Supreme Court decision to preserve our Miranda rights. The instinct to react with heavy-handedness to what happened on Tuesday is perfectly understandable. But if we want to remain the nation we have paid dearly to become — a land of freedom and opportunity that over the past 215 years has emerged as the envy of the world — we cannot in knee-jerk fashion react to even this heinous attack by closing up and shutting down our free society.
Other countries — even other democracies — live by a variety of freedom-restricting measures; their citizens’ daily lives are subtly, if not harshly, encumbered by them. Britain, for example, places significant limitations on what the press can publish — in our country, we call that " prior restraint. " In other countries citizens can be arrested on suspicion of committing certain crimes and held in jail without bail for varying lengths of time. And, most obviously, in Israel, where acts of terror have ingrained the fear of annihilation in every citizen’s psyche, draconian restrictions are the rule.
In the face of what we have just experienced — perhaps even more so because of it — we need to think carefully and cautiously before we put in place measures that, even if they seem protective now, could ultimately lead to what Edmund Burke once described as a state of " ordered liberty. " We cannot permit the destruction of the very freedoms we in this country hold to be precious. We must make certain that when the debris from the buildings that once stood as symbols of our national pride is cleared away, the real foundation of our nation’s being — our freedom — is not left in the rubble.
For full coverage of the Tuesday of terror, click here.
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