A legacy of resilience and fear

In the first days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans emerged with a deeper, painful sense of community. Mourning begot a frenzy of patriotism. Miniature flags adorned jacket lapels and flapped from car windows, at least for a few months. People tended to the grieving, made heroes of firefighters and vowed to band together on airplanes to take down any further in-flight threats. And they did. Passengers and flight attendants on a trans-Atlantic flight successfully tackled Richard Reid three months later as he attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe. Terrorists could break our skyscrapers but not our spirit. Instead, it was a reckless banking industry that set off an economic catastrophe in 2008 that shook Americans’ faith in the future.

Photos: World Trade Center attack site, then and now

There are many ways to measure the effects of 9/11 on Americans, but it’s surprising how fleeting some of them were. If the tragedy moved us to be more concerned neighbors, it didn’t necessarily make us more accepting. Some panicked or became aggressive when they saw a Muslim, or a person they thought looked like one, on a plane. Plans for an Islamic center just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site provoked such intense protest that President Obama had to call for something elementally American: religious tolerance. As for the much-discussed sense of national unity, the George W. Bush administration’s response to 9/11 ushered in a period of intense political polarization that has, if anything, worsened under Obama.

The clearest and most lasting legacy of the attacks for Americans is fear. Before 9/11, this was a country lulled into a sense of invincibility as the world’s greatest military power, a country that had not seen a large-scale foreign attack on American shores since the bombing of the naval base at Pearl Harbor, or any massive, violent incursion on civilian neighborhoods since the Civil War. With the end of the 50-year-old Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed “the end of history,” and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer trumpeted “the unipolar moment.” After 9/11, however, police patrolled airports and skyscrapers, opening car trunks and demanding identification of any who entered. Fear insinuated itself into our lives in serious and silly ways. A mound of spilled sugar on a desk could bring an entire office building to a standstill while a hazmat team was called in to determine whether it was anthrax.

Today, Americans don’t seem to know what to feel. We both grouse about and take comfort in the security screenings that get tweaked every year or so. We live with the fear of a terrorist attack as resignedly as Californians live with the fear of an epic earthquake. It’s bound to happen one day, but who knows where or when?

In the weeks after 9/11, government officials said it wasn’t a matter of if there would be another attack in this country, it was a matter of when. But in 2011, most Americans ignore that prophecy. Even warnings such as last week’s “specific, credible but unconfirmed” threat cause general anxiety but are ignored in practice by many. We show up at airports, hauling our children and pets and 3-ounce bottles of shampoo, more afraid of spilling liquids in luggage than dying on planes. We push our trepidation to the backs of our minds, and board. And 10 years after two skyscrapers were destroyed and the Pentagon was struck in acts of unimagined terror, that resilience is not a bad thing to have rebuilt.

Photos: World Trade Center attack site, then and now