Before and After: September 11

As the ruins of the World Trade towers smoldered at the southern end of Manhattan and the breeze stirred the ashes of thousands of human beings, a new age of anxiety was born. If someone had slept through Sept. 11 and awakened, Rip van Winkle-like today, he would open his eyes on an astonishing new landscape.

Guardsmen toting M-16s are stationed at our airports. The president of the United States attends a World Series game and the airspace over Yankee Stadium is closed, a line of snipers positioned on the stadium rooftop. The vice-president's safekeepers whisk him from place to place, just as his arch-nemesis Osama bin Laden is presumably moved from cave to cave halfway across the world. Anthrax panic sends Congress running from its chambers.

The events of Sept. 11 divided our world into two radically different eras. We watch wistfully as the pre-9/11 world drifts away on its raft of memory, cast in Technicolor shades of nostalgia. We will remember that assassinated world as idyllic, secure (never mind that it was neither), we will speak of it in the reverent tones reserved for the dead.

Meanwhile, the post 9/11 era looms like an unmapped wilderness. As with other unclaimed territories throughout history, a fierce battle is being waged for its psychic, political and material capital. Former president Bill Clinton has called this conflict "the struggle for the soul of the 21st century," and the spoils of war include some of our most cherished values and liberties. Leading the charge are the warriors of the Bush administration, a battalion of securitycrats and generals who are attempting to colonize the future with their own repressive agenda.

But there is a brighter side, a growing chorus of dissenting voices who reject paranoia and hubris and question the rush toward becoming a security state. There is a dialectic afoot in the country, a stirring of peaceful purpose that has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which assumes the public is thinking in red, white and blue, when actually the spectrum of emotions, ideas and opinions is, like America itself, multihued.

Just before his death in November 2001, Ken Kesey described the state of the union in succinctly Keseyian terms: "The men in suits are telling us what the men in uniforms are going to do to the men in turbans if they don't turn over the men in hiding." With the prescience of a dying man, Kesey ventured that this was really a war between the brutal, aggressively male way things had always been and "the timorous and fragile way things might begin to be." As many Americans continue to do, Kesey nurtured great hopes for a future constructed on a model of mutual cooperation, trust and rational thinking.

No Longer Invulnerable

The attacks in New York and Washington shattered the sense of invulnerability that was a hallmark of the American psyche. After 9/11, we looked at each other with new eyes, asked new questions. If you found yourself trapped in a doomed airplane with a cell phone in hand, whom would you call? Pundits wrote that the country had lost its innocence, overlooking the fact that innocence is not a desirable quality in a superpower nation.

Overnight, the United States perceived a sword of Damocles suspended over its head and the ensuing waves of paranoia initiated surreal episodes: a nationwide run on gas masks; a demand from the Postal Service that all mail be irradiated against biological threats; and, most appalling of all, Op-Eds that declared using nuclear weapons against Muslim countries would be justified if terrorists killed so much as one more American.

Among the unavoidable truths to emerge from 9/11 is that being on U.S. soil does not render us immune from harm. The American people now have much more in common with millions of the planet's citizens who spend their lives in regions where armed conflict or terrorism take innocent lives daily. We too are mired near the bottom of Maslow's pyramid, struggling to regain our lost sense of safety and security.