A new national resilience
Ever since the attacks of 9/11 shocked the nation, Americans have been urged by political leaders to learn resilience in the face of terrorism. That’s been critical to improving our ability to withstand such attacks and to show terrorists that their strategy won’t have the effects they desire.
Now, we face our nation’s scariest moment since then: a virus that’s killed thousands around the world and spreading. But the same resilience that we learned to show in the face of terrorism—centered on continuing with everyday life—isn’t wise in the face of this new threat. It’s dangerous, foolish and selfish. At a pivotal moment for slowing the spread of coronavirus on U.S. soil, Americans need to learn a new kind of resilience that’s the opposite of what they’ve spent 20 years cultivating, and fast.
It was soon after 9/11 that Americans were first exhorted not to let the devastating attacks of that day interfere with ordinary life. Within weeks, President George W. Bush was encouraging Americans “to go about their lives, to fly on airplanes, to travel, to go to work.”
He was right: Once the federal government felt confident that no second wave of al-Qaida attacks was imminent, it was critical to America’s economy, society and collective psychology not to let the tragedy bring a superpower to a standstill.
Throughout the Bush and Obama presidencies, Americans developed an admirable ability to recover from terrorism quickly and go about our lives.
If anything, coping with international terrorism has led the United States—both as a policy matter and as a societal matter—to be slow to adapt to an evolving national security threat environment in which domestic terrorism, great-power competition, biological threats and other emerging issues demand greater attention.
Now the novel coronavirus is injecting Americans
with a new form of fear. So it’s hard to blame Americans for responding with the type of resilience they’ve been urged to cultivate since 9/11: defiance and insistence on carrying on with ordinary life. That seems to be contributing to the sentiments we’ve all seen across the Internet, from packed concerts to crowded bars to the insistence by some politicians that “it’s a great time to go out and go to a local restaurant.”
But a virus isn’t terrorism. The only way Americans can stop the spread of the coronavirus enough to give our medical services a chance of keeping up with it—and saving lives—is by social distancing. Going to concerts, bars and restaurants is precisely what we can’t afford— not till we’ve “flattened the curve” of its spread.
There are some lessons we’ve learned from confronting terrorism that should be applied to this crisis. Chief among those are improved coordination among federal government agencies, the use of inter-agency task forces with defined chains of command and competent leadership to force the bureaucracy to all row in the same direction, enhanced information sharing among the federal, state and local governments, meaningful engagement and cooperation with our foreign allies and partners, and augmented use of legal authorities that can unlock swiftly emergency dollars and put them in the hands of those who know how to spend them intelligently right now.
And we need resilience right now, desperately. It just happens to be the exact opposite of the kind of resilience that we’ve been practicing for two decades. We need a new resilience that involves avoiding large gatherings and unnecessary face-to-face interactions, keeping our families and friends safe, caring for the most vulnerable among us, and figuring out how to keep our work and our broader lives on track through phone calls, email, and video conferences.
To be resilient after 9/11 was to get back on a plane. To be resilient right now is to stay at home.