What I Tell My Children About 9/11

What do you say about a moment as remarked upon as 9/11? The 25th anniversary of that terrible day brings an obligation of remembrance, yet even the veteran writer recognizes the futility (or heresy) of trying to express something new or different.

So today, I decided simply to share with you what I am telling my children about the meaning and residue of that day that killed 2,977 innocents, and thousands more in its aftermath.

My boys are 17 and 14, so, like about one-third of Americans, they were not alive when the Twin Towers fell. Some scene-setting is in order.

It is not exactly correct to say all was swell as of Sept. 10, 2001. The dot-com bubble had burst the year before, sparking a relatively mild recession that would last another couple of months. The George W. Bush presidency was just getting started, albeit with no honeymoon period after an election that ended in close calls at both the Supreme Court and the Electoral College.

Yet in many ways that Tuesday morning dawned like an extension of the mostly happy and prosperous 1990s. The Cold War was still over, and the Soviet Union was still dead. Serious people wrote about “the end of history”: the triumph of our system over all others. After Vietnam and Watergate and stagflation, it was morning in America again with peace, strength and rapid growth that ran almost unbroken for nearly two decades. From Hollywood to Coca-Cola, our culture was dominant.

And then someone tried to knock us down.

Now, the hatred announced on 9/11 was not a matter of jealousy. No one flies a loaded passenger plane into one of your skyscrapers – and another one, and one into your military headquarters, and another bound for your seat of government – because of your per capita GDP.

The 19 terrorists who hijacked those airplanes, and those who sent them, hated us because of who we were. And because of what they were, which was evil.

Twenty-five years ago, it was already somewhat passé to use words like “evil” to describe other human beings. The West had already begun suffering the crisis of confidence and moral relativism that have only grown more pronounced.

Even calling the hijackers “terrorists” was too controversial for some, as we were recently reminded when the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reaffirmed its policy not to use the T-word without attribution. (Company officials later clarified it was OK in just this one case.) One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, eh?

Except there was no freedom being sought by al-Qaida, unless it was the freedom to compel others to adopt their beliefs. Osama bin Laden was not a revolutionary hero; he was a radical warlord without a state, just an army of suicide bombers.

He was evil.

Twenty-five years later, bin Laden is dead and Gitmo is alive – still holding Osama’s buddy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been in prison there since 2006 and, incredibly, won’t stand trial for another two years. The wheels of justice grind slowly. But they do grind, another admirable feature of our democratic republic.

Our government and our people are not perfect, and no one can say that every decision made after 9/11 was correct. Modern life being what it is, the failures have commanded more attention than the successes. And yes, that is because some of the failures have come at great cost, and because too many of the prizes purchased with American blood and treasure have been of questionable worth.

Yet despite those failures, and even if history didn’t end, our system – the one recognizing unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, secured by governments instituted among men and deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – still beats any alternative.

That includes China’s system, Russia’s system, Iran’s system, and any other eyed longingly by those of our countrymen who’d like to pursue their grand plans without such niceties as other people’s “rights” and “consent.”

In the days and weeks after 9/11, many a politician and commentator remarked that “the terrorists won” if their actions cowed us into doing this or not doing that. In the months and years afterward, the phrase became something of a running joke – as in, “if I don’t go to the bar tonight, then the terrorists won.” Like a spoken proto-meme.

But let me invoke the phrase once more in earnest: If we cannot close this chapter of our history with confidence in our own way of life and place in the world, then maybe the terrorists won after all.