How and Why Americans Hurt: Examining the Effects of September 11
William Smiley
I have a confession to make: September 11, I sat for hours in front of my television set. Numbed by the sights and sounds of the crying and the bleeding, I could only sit and blankly stare as figures emerged from the clouds of smoke, dust, and ash. Of course, at the time, I hadn't realized-the ash, that is. I hadn't realized that the survivors were actually covered in the ashes of those not so fortunate to escape. Survivors. The American people were all trying to survive. But, somehow, we were all victims as well. And perhaps my ignorance was intentional, some sort of emergency defense mechanism that either could not or would not accept reality. Honestly, it was all so unreal.
Yet this seems like no great confession. I am sure that much of the nation and world can recall such morbid captivation combined with disbelief. Actually, my true confession might seem rather mundane. Still, I must reveal that President George W. Bush was the first person to dispel my willing disillusionment-he was the first commentator to impress upon me the stark reality of all that happened. On the night of September 11, the commander in chief addressed a nation, a changed nation, that suddenly knew fear:
Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes or in their offices: secretar-ies, businessmen and women, military and federal workers, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.1
I believe that Bush's speech made such an impression on me because both his voice and demeanor were tinged with a deeply unsettling quality uncharacteristic of the Texan president. After all, prior to September 11, Bush was largely reduced to a sort of caricature. He was forced to suffer the cruel irony that some of his most outspoken "supporters" were late night talk show hosts who quipped that they would never be out of jobs as long as he was in office. But on the night of September 11, the curtain fell on these comedy routines. The president had been transformed; his words carried a newfound sense of authority that truly put into perspective the threat that the United States was facing. No one was laughing. Although Bush's words were still plain and few, they were nonetheless chosen very carefully. And so, despite his poor track record, our president ultimately set the tone for a country mired in confusion, on the verge of panic, and at war.
WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?
In the wake of September 11, many American citizens wanted answers, they wanted action. Helplessness, it seems, did not suit our country well. At the time, I was merely swept along by the many news headlines and interruptions to my regularly scheduled programs.
In retrospect, I must admit that the Bush Administration's response demonstrated how firmly its fingers were pressed to the pulse of the American people. Specifically, the president voiced the nation's concerns by addressing the questions that must have been on our minds: Why do Arabs hate us? How will we fight and win this war? What is expected of the ordinary citizen?2 Yet, despite his volley of answers, did the president really address the deeply emotional response that most citizens of the United States were, and possibly still are, experiencing?
Gwen, a woman in her mid-thirties living on Maryland's Eastern Shore, attempted to capture that experience:
I think most Americans felt violated by what happened. We have been insulated from the kind of violence that most of the rest of the world lives with every day. I think that for me, living here in this quiet little town, even though we're only an hour and twenty minutes from Washington, I wake up every morning and I'm grateful that I live in a place where I don't lock my door at night. I feel totally insulated from most of the violence and terrorism in the world. And that's probably not a healthy attitude to have.
And so, it appears that the fundamental senses of shock and confusion that most Americans shared could be rooted in a common national identity. From what Gwen has said, one can derive that for quite some time now we've mistakenly believed that safety is a constant in our lives. And we didn't just believe. We knew. We knew that we were safe in our homes and in our streets, we knew that living in fear was something that the rest of the world would go to sleep with at night. But never us. We knew. So it seems that, at best, we had become complacent.
There is nothing that we've believed in more than our own invincibility. In fact, the immensity of so-called western society has virtually evaporated from our imaginations; its theoretical boundaries have been whittled away so that only the United States remains as some idealized pinnacle of civilization. With such principles at the root of the American identity, no wonder our hearts fell while our arms and voices rose.
Given the nearly self-righteous attitude that Americans possess, television audiences quickly realized the symbolic significance of the September 11 attacks. Surely, our trust in our own permanence and indestructibility was no better demonstrated than in the live reports from the Pentagon building. News broadcasters were convinced that there was no serious structural damage to our center of defense and intelligence; it could not have possibly amounted to more than a little smoke and flames confined to the building's exterior. But as the day wore on, the nation was stunned to discover that the explosion actually tore into this supposed superstructure, severely damaging our national identity in the process. In short, Americans have always taken for granted the impenetrability of the Pentagon; we never questioned the absolute security it represents. Gwen encapsulates the resulting change in herself as an American:
To be American means one word: freedom. Freedom from harm, freedom to express myself, freedom in moving about the world. As an American, [before September 11] I felt I could go anywhere and do anything. That's changing. I wouldn't go to the Middle East for all the money in the world. I'm inclined to say that I wouldn't go beyond an English-speaking country. You risk taking your life in your own hands.
WAR IN BLACK AND WHITE
To go anywhere and do anything. As Americans, we have long felt that our lives are so great because they are so unrestricted. Now, we begin to wonder. Our power had remained unchallenged for so long, we could scarcely believe, or even begin to comprehend, the sounds and images from ground zero. It was unreal. It couldn't happen. At least, not in America. President Bush echoed these sentiments in his address:
On September 11, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morn-ing. Americans have known surprise attacks, but never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.3
Admittedly, as a rallying point, this was a brilliant move. The president consistently placed his political persona to the side and appeared before his people as a human being. The result: the masses could quickly relate to this man in Washington, D. C., and they offered their heartfelt support. Nevertheless, Pam, a twenty-year-old college student, objects to this tactic:
Well, what are we? We aren't any saints. I mean, I didn't do anything to that person in Afghanistan, but my government did. There's families over there. There's little kids and their mothers...I'm not justifying their actions, killing thousands of people, but we've killed people too. We've had people assassinated, we've taken control of their ways of life, and I think they were just tired of it and retaliated. I don't think it was right, but I think they had every reason to do it.
Unfortunately, Pam's voice rises from among the significant minority. She argues that the president's attitude boils away the finer details so that only the black and white scraps remain. Such an oversimplification victimizes the United States when, in all honesty, we lost our innocence long ago. Yet the sad fact remains that much of the American people, like their president, view the United States through blinders, seeing it only as a venerable and virtuous nation.
During the State of the Union address, Bush coined the term "axis of evil" by carelessly lumping Iraq, Iran, and North Korea together as one concrete threat. Rhetorically speaking, the term skews the facts and convolutes the war into an epic struggle of good versus evil. But more importantly, an axis of evil conjures a common enemy in the mind of the nation. It is a psychological ploy that reinforces our ideas of who we are as Americans, giving us a sense of unity and purpose. Never mind that the axis of evil was a deliberate manipulation of truth, a mere invention of Bush's speechwriters.
Certainly, the President overlooked the fact that Iraq and Iran were at war for nearly a decade. Yes, he simply forgot that in no way are they joined in an alliance of any sort. Moreover, administrators admit that North Korea has been out of the terrorism business since the eighties and that it only remains on the State Department's list of nations sponsoring terrorism as a matter of diplomatic pressure. Granted, they all have markets for missiles, but terrorists' interests are elsewhere, primarily on biological and nuclear entities.4 In the harsh light of truth, Bush was essentially exploiting a threat that does not currently exist. There was no real reason to believe that these three countries were operating in tandem or that they needed a warning of any kind. Bush's accusation only fanned the flames of hostility.
SHADES OF AN ETHNIC IDENTITY
Throughout my discussion, I have invariably mentioned the concept of national identity in the United States. Interestingly, it seems that much of the president's energy has been directed toward reassuring Americans that we all are indeed united: "America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country...In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect."5 The importance of being American unravels with the realization that "a name serves as a rallying point, and a tangible one, around which an identity can be rebuilt."6 In this case, President Bush points out that although United States citizens are superficially divided into categories such as those designated by race and religion, we can all still call ourselves Americans. Now, let us not forget Royce's statement that "names of ethnic categories...provide individuals with something to invoke when they have no other immediate indicators of ethnic identity."7 Therefore, we seem to have the proposal that to be American is to belong to a distinct ethnic group.
Obviously, a name alone is not enough to convincingly argue that there exists an American ethnicity. But Royce elaborates on the matter by drawing from Isajiw's subjective approach, which claims that ethnicity is a process by which individuals are identified from either within or without as being different from others or belonging to a different group.8 Basically, Americans are simply what we make of ourselves and what others perceive us as. "An ethnic group consists of people who conceive of themselves as being of a kind. They are united by emotional bonds and concerned with the preservation of their type. With very few exceptions they speak the same language...and they share a common cultural heritage."9 With this information, we can begin to understand the sentiments of shock and fear that nearly all Americans felt as emotional links that preserve a common ethnic identity. Bush's efforts to reinforce American national unity can therefore be perceived as his attempt to exploit the fact that "ethnic groups are simply another kind of reference group that individuals may choose to invoke, ignore, or oscillate between depending on their perception of the situation."10
CONCLUSION
We might take the road of the idealist, we might call on humankind to join hands and work toward a mutual understanding of our differences. Yet, such wide-eyed optimism seems utopian and unrealistic. Can we truly expect that every nation of the world would lay down its weapons and commit to such a gesture of peace? I wish that I might recover my childhood naiveté and cling to the belief that the problems of war might be resolved if only we all wanted it enough.
However, I must remind myself that I abandoned the unreal, the disillusionment, with the passing of September 11 and that this generation has grown past its age of innocence. Of course, this is not to say that there is no hope, only that we must consider practical alternatives. Instead, I think that an American ethnicity might disperse the cloud of senseless violence by bringing the events of September 11 into a more meaningful focus. But is an American ethnic group a reality? Maybe. The convenience of ethnicity lies in its intangibility, the fact that it is merely a product of our desire to belong and relate to some order larger than ourselves. After all, ethnicity means unity.
On the dark side of humanity, we have seen that inclusion becomes grounds for exclusion, and exclusion grounds for hatred and fear. On the other hand, a glimmer of the idealist reminds us that to link nationality with ethnicity requires cultural ownership of our actions.
Rather than think of our government as some removed entity in Washington, D.C., we would recognize that it is intrinsically a part of who we are as American people. As a result, the American public could no longer think of itself as an innocent bystander, leaving its government the blame. On the contrary, we would be forced to shoulder the weight of each of our government's international exploits because our identity itself would be at stake. Certainly, the government is not some body of strangers; the government is the voice of the people, our representative. With an American ethnicity, any move this country makes will directly reflect on the character of its people. Gradually, we will realize that with national pride we must necessarily accept national disappointment.
Ultimately, American ethnicity places the choice between pride and disappointment in the hands of the people, thereby giving us all the opportunity to set the course of our cultural destiny. At the very least, our own dignity might save us.
Notes
- President, Address, "Address to the Nation," (2001) <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010911-16.html> (27 February 2002).
- President, Address, "President Declares 'Freedom at War with Fear,'" <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920-8.html> (27 February 2002).
- President, Address, "Address to the Nation."
- "The axis of evil: Is it for real?" Time, 11 February 2002, 30.
- President, Statement, "Islam is Peace," <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010917-11.html> (27 February 2002).
- Anya Peterson Royce. Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 27.
- Ibid.
- Wsevolod, Isajiw. "Definitions of Ethnicity," Ethnicity 1, (1974) 115.
- Tamatsu Shibutani and Kian M. Kwan, Ethnic Stratification (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 40-41.
- Royce, 24.
Bibliography
"The axis of evil: Is it for real?" Time, 11 February 2002, 30.
Isajiw, Wsevolod. "Definitions of Ethnicity." Ethnicity 1, (1974): 111-124.
Royce, Anya Peterson. Ethnic Identity: Strategies of Diversity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.
President. Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People. "President Declares 'Freedom at War with Fear.'"
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920-8.html> (27 February 2002).
President. Address. "Address to the Nation." <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010911-16.html> (27 February 2002).
President. Statement. "Islam is Peace." <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010917-11.html> (27 February 2002).
Shibutani, Tamatsu and Kian M. Kwan. Ethnic Stratification, New York: Macmillan, 1965.