9/11: A lesson forgotten?

Readers, please forgive the belatedness of these reflections. They’ve been percolating in my head for a few weeks.

In the days and weeks leading up to the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, I must have watched that famous footage of President Bush on top of the rubble at Ground Zero about 30 times.

It was one of the most potent images that came out of those bleak days. The president wrapped his arm around Bob Beckwith of the New York City Fire Department and raised a bullhorn in hand to offer words of encouragement to the assembled crowd. With no remarks prepared, he gave a speech that rallied the nation.

“I can hear you,” he assured the workers at the site, along with the rest of us. “The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

The speech was memorable in part for its raw spontaneity. But it was the content of the president’s remarks that stirred something in every American who heard them. At that moment, we didn’t need leaders to stoke national solidarity. The attacks themselves had done that. What we needed was a purpose.

Mourning would not be enough. We would not pretend this was some anonymous disaster that had befallen us like an earthquake or a tsunami. There were perpetrators, and their actions would be answered. We would find the killers and bring them to account for their deeds. Most importantly, we would pretend no longer that the world was all shades of grey — that the prevalence of radical ideology in countries half a world away was no concern of ours. For, all too often, the same regimes whose religious police stone women in the streets also harbor or sponsor terrorists who expand the reach of radicalism through violence. Sept. 11 taught us that wherever such hatred is bred, we cannot turn a blind eye.

The attacks were a call to action that remains relevant to this day — even if we disagree about the particulars of policy. But during the University’s memorial services on Cannon Green two and a half weeks ago, I couldn’t help but worry that we’d forgotten our mandate.

I don’t mean to take away from the somber beauty of that ceremony, especially not the high point, when Chloe Wohlforth ’07 recounted the University community’s response to her father’s death in the World Trade Center. And to Princeton’s great credit, the ceremony featured none of the crass finger pointing and hand-wringing we’d seen from some (particularly our own Paul Krugman, who called the anniversary “an occasion for shame”).

Indeed, all the speeches were eloquent. But the main thrust of the ceremony wasn’t the lesson we’d learned 10 years earlier about the interconnectedness of the world and our role in it. That theme, so omnipresent in the days after the attacks, barely featured in the service at all.

Instead the message conveyed was more introspective — that the terrorists’ moral failings should impel us to cherish and safeguard our own society’s tolerance and inclusiveness. Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah made an appeal for cosmopolitanism and cultural “waviness,” warning the audience of the dangers of “identities with sharp edges.” And President Tilghman told the crowd, “We must also recommit ourselves to ensuring that hatred and intolerance — which took devastating form on 9/11 — do not find fertile ground in our midst ... We must draw clear distinction between those who perpetrate atrocities and those who share their ethnicity, religion or culture.”

All fine sentiments, to be sure. But that the need for tolerance has become such an overriding theme of our remembrance of the attacks at the expense of other lessons seems peculiar.

It should go without saying that in our response to the threat of terrorism, we must not violate the values our society holds dear. But as the speakers themselves acknowledged explicitly, the terror attacks were born of no intolerance on our part. And to some degree, the lesson of the attacks was that liberal society should make an active effort not to tolerate the most dangerously illiberal values wherever they are held.

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Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that for the most part, Princeton’s ceremony implored us to cast our gaze inward, not outward. This year has seen the death of Osama bin Laden and the birth of a wave of popular unrest in the Middle East and North Africa. We are war-weary after a full decade in Afghanistan. Now, more than ever, it is tempting to close the book on the age of terrorism, to leave the world as it is and focus our efforts within our own borders.

But the 9/11 era has not ended. So long as the forces of radical Islam can find refuge, that book cannot be closed firmly. And now more than ever, with the Middle East in turmoil and politicians making appeals to our most isolationist sentiments, we must use events like the anniversary of the attacks to remind ourselves of Sept. 11’s most obvious lesson: that we have a stake in fixing our broken world.

Let’s not forget that responsibility.

Jacob Reses is a Wilson School major from Linwood, N.J. He can be reached at jreses@princeton.edu.