Terrorism Steels Our `Family' Fiber

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 22, 2001 | by Woody West

The images of Sept. 11 will remain searing, the sheer evil of that day embedded in the crevices of the mind where indelible memories endure. But there are other images of that day and the following days that are inspiriting. These offer hope for the brutal "twilight war" that will test the soul and constancy of this nation -- they are the photographs and biographies being published of the more than 6,000 victims of the horrific attacks. To ponder these photos and the histories they embody is to see the contemporary face of America.

It is a polyglot America, in every racial shade on the globe, of the native-born and the immigrants, male and female. It encompasses ages, religions, occupations, personal journeys and aspirations of those slaughtered in New York City and Washington and on a placid field in Pennsylvania. These pictures are the surface representations of the unity that is stirring even doubters about the fiber of Americans in this first, awful year of the millennium.

The cliche that we all are immigrants here has been worn to a nubbin of late, but it remains true -- truer even in a way now than in the past. Black Americans are more conspicuous among those who, going about their daily lives, fell to the terrorists than would have been the case a quarter-century ago; Asians and Latin Americans, too, helped to fill the appalling ranks of the slain in remarkable numbers compared with a few decades back.

The ideological multiculturalists, those who preach racial and ethnic separatism, the voices that deny the legitimacy of this country to "Americanize" those who not long ago were outliers, are wrong. Very wrong. The wives and husbands and children of those incinerated painfully instruct us of our profound stake in the United States, a realization written in the blood of Sept. 11.

The family of the nation has been bonded in a fashion that a few weeks ago seemed unlikely. The near unanimity of Americans in outrage cannot be sustained indefinitely, of course; passion by its nature exhausts itself. The voices of ambivalence already are being heard. "Restraint" in national action is being urged. There are the usual voices contending that violence solves nothing though, in fact, it does, if not everlastingly then at least sufficient to the threat. Vengeance begets only vengeance, it is said, though the preachers of that sentiment ignore the fact that retribution is intrinsic to justice.

Increasingly there will be two factors inhibiting America's response to this implacable war. The first is our national impatience; the second is the pervasive therapeutic" culture that has infested the culture. Impatience is both a weakness and a strength, to be sure. It is a weakness if it asserts the visceral over the thoughtful. It is a strength to the extent that it can focus acutely on a problem and find ways to solve it without going through the dance of "on the one hand and on the other hand." It is a sharp tool when used skillfully.

The therapeutic mode has penetrated so deeply into our social behavior that it can disarm those who subscribe to it: There is no evil but only sickness, the individual is merely a puppet of his environment and the individual must be stroked to feel better about himself. "Grief counseling" is one of the therapeutic society's obvious manifestations, with the psychologist often called to the scene of a disaster as quickly as emergency services. "Sensitivity" is revered as the essence of virtue -- as grotesquely illustrated by the "diversity quilt" CIA personnel at Langley were creating as part of mandatory touchy-feely seminars (as reported in an Insight article, "Blinded Vigilance," Oct. 15), wasting golden hours of intelligence labor while the diabolical warriors were polishing their plot.

This therapeutic perspective suggests that stress and anxiety need to be treated as aberrations in the human condition rather than as deep and constant aspects of being alive. A poll the week after the Sept. 11 assault on the United States found that three-quarters of those surveyed were depressed by the horror of that day. Well, of course. That is the most natural reaction, and reflective individuals distill from this outrage a sense of how their lives must adapt and respond in the community of Americans.

"The United States is likely to emerge from the attacks a different country, more unified, less self-absorbed and much more in need of the help of its friends to carry out what will become a new national project of defeating terrorism," wrote Francis Fukuyama in the London Financial Times three days after the bombings.

There is another factor we must confront: the desire of Americans to be loved, to be viewed by the rest of the world as we view ourselves and indeed are -- as decent, generous and friendly. We had best now adopt the Roman dictum in the years when enemies were restlessly accumulating on the frontiers of empire: "Let them hate, so long as they fear." That is a steely sentiment from which we dare not flinch. The terrorists who envy and despise our democratic republic will continue trying to up the ante of fear.