Changes Wrought By 9/11: Not What You Expected

The smoke and dust from the ruin of the World Trade Center towers have finally cleared and visitors to the site -- an estimated 3.6 million of them, according to the New York Times -- can now breathe easier as they gaze down into the hulking crater and up at the gap in the skyline that reveals the patch of new sky that came into view when the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001.

Not much is left in that gash in the ground but a skeleton of scaffolding, construction in its earliest stages. What are they looking for, these curious millions? Are they remembering the past or imagining the future? It is safe to say that the future in which we find ourselves is very unlike the one we imagined on that dark day a year ago, the day when everything changed. And things have changed -- just not in the way we expected.

What were you afraid of on Sept. 11? What frightens you today, one year later? Chances are, the two answers are quite different. On that horrifying day, we had a common enemy: the individuals who committed this unspeakable crime. Americans had never been more united. But today, our fears have largely dissipated, and it is no longer clear who the real enemy is. Despite the efforts of Ashcroft and the Bush Administration to keep the public at a fever pitch of paranoia, most of us are afraid of threats that are far more real than lurking terrorists, "dirty" bombs or anthrax.

We are afraid of corrupt corporate executives, afraid of what a crumbling economy and a crashing stock market will mean to our jobs and our retirement savings. We are afraid of predatory pedophile priests. Increasingly, we are afraid of our own government. One year after 9/11, we are finally learning to distinguish real menaces from manufactured hysteria.

On this one-year anniversary, we revisit the pain and loss and disbelief of 9/11. But it is no longer possible to view the act as isolated from the consequences. New events, in many ways more far reaching, have overtaken it. In fundamental ways, the tragedy of 9/11, which could have brought us wisdom and helped chart a more sane future, has been taken away from us, devoured by our all-enveloping media and twisted by political forces intent upon imposing their wills on the public.

Everyone with an agenda to advance has taken up 9/11 as an explanation, a rationale, a reason for their point of view and way of thinking. This has provoked new battles each day, as the Bush administration, loser in the popular vote and elected by the Supreme Court, aggressively attempts to use the war on terrorism to justify its destructive policies, from drilling for oil in Alaska and expanding police powers to dramatically increasing the military budget and unilaterally abrogating treaties that were signed years ago.

One reason why our expectations post-9/11 were distorted is that the act was falsely framed. A singular and unbelievably "lucky" criminal act carried out by a small group of fanatics acting on behalf of no government was declared an act of war by Bush, Cheney and the mainstream media. Viewed in this lens, 9/11 created an opportunity to initiate the perpetual war against terrorism that we have been fighting ever since.

As John Tirman, program director of the Social Science Research Council, writes, "It is conceivable -- likely, even -- that the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001, were a one-time catastrophe; if there is a determined network of terrorists ready to strike again, expect them to set forest fires, not to ram a truck into the Lincoln Memorial....The plain fact is that not a single, credible threat has been revealed by the U.S. government since that sad day...The thought that we need to spend $100 billion of tax money annually, and much more in private funds and opportunity costs, to 'protect' against such a threat is, at the least, questionable."