A CALL FOR RESOLVE
Doris O'Brien
America is a country of deep compassion and shallow collective memory. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, many of us seem to have traded a sense of outrage for one of inconvenience. If we are moved to anger at all, it is now directed not at the terrorists, but at those who cannot guarantee our safety from them.
Early on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was awakened by a phone call from our younger daughter, who had accompanied my elderly mother to our nation's capital for a party the day before. "We're OK," she began. "I didn't want you to worry. We were heading to the Washington airport to fly back to New York when it happened, but now we're staying put." There was silence on both ends. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?" she asked, and told me briefly about the attacks on the Twin Towers.
My groggy mind wandered back a few years to when this same child had called in the middle of the night from her home in Santa Monica, plunged into total darkness by the earthquake that rocked the Southland, and asking, "What happened?" Now it was my turn to sit in ignorance of a catastrophic event.
A year after 9/11, I flew to New York for my mother's 100th birthday celebration in Manhattan. Time and the ceaseless energy of determined Americans had turned Ground Zero into a vacant lot. The city blockwide clearing seemed surreal, unexpectedly void Of villainy and all else. Might it be possible, I wondered, to expunge the memory of what had happened here as quickly as it had been to haul away the massive pile of rubble?
Lining the periphery of Ground Zero were a few tributes to the victims, but the site itself was a deep, barren pit without any trace of what Shelley in his poem "Ozymandius" called "the decay of that colossal ruin." A young woman handed me a copy of a poem about how the souls lost on 9/11 had never left. They were everywhere around us - in the air, the sunshine, the clouds, the dust of trampled earth. I choked back tears.
I remember looking up into the bright September sky and seeing the smaller surrounding buildings of Manhattan's skyline, most of them old and handsome, reemerging after 30 years in the shadows of a modernistic giant felled to its knees and dragged away. Those iconic monoliths, like many trapped inside them, were really too young to die.
As I stood there, my mind again went back in time to the winter before 9/11, when my husband and I, on a bitterly cold December day, had taken one of the World Trade Center elevators that whisked visitors to the Top of the World restaurant and observation deck The far reaches of the Twin Towers, we noticed, created its own extreme weather, as we braced'ourselves against a cold, battering wind.
In retrospect, however, the force of nature on that day was nothing compared to the ferocious fanaticism of those who slammed into the W orId Trade Center nine months later. The pall that hung in the air of Manhattan on 9/11 has cleared. Unfortunately, in its place an appalling sense of false security has settled smugly over the American psyche.
Removing our shoes at airports and now banishing liquids from carry-on luggage are measures that merely make us suppose flying to be safer than it was five years ago. Even faced with the latest frigIltening reality of the London-based plots to spectacularly destroy airplanes heading for the United States, we still maintain a rigid, stance of "political correctness'" and a reluctance toward "racial profiling" that amount to checking our brains instead of our bags. And while we worry about our "rights," we neglect the "wrongs" that could destroy our way of life.
As the anniversary of Sept. 11 nears, we Americans must ask ourselves if we have the national will to demand that our government take any and all serious measures to protect our country from another catastrophic attack. Or has our complacency lulled us into the dangerous belief that such an attack is as unpredictable as a natural disaster, leaving us helpless against those determined to rock the very foundations of our great land?
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Text of an Op-Ed piece by Doris Schaffer O'Brien which appear- ed on pages 1 and 4 of the editorial section of the Sep- tember 10, 2006 edition of the Santa Barbara News Press.