9/11 anniversary: How we’ve changed
America has lost so much over 19 years, said Garrett Graff in TheAtlantic.com. After 9/11, the nation “rallied together in sadness and fury” to defeat a common foe and collectively mourn the nearly 3,000 souls who perished on that tragic, unforgettable day. President George W. Bush’s approval rating “soared into the 90s,” first responders and soldiers were celebrated everywhere, and a can-do patriotism suffused our efforts to rebuild and heal, and defeat al Qaida. Today, the country grieves again, with nearly 200,000 people dead from the coronavirus, but instead of creating unity, this assault has left America a “splintered nation,” with “nothing to unite around.” Countries in Europe and Asia are seeing death tolls and new cases dwindle and life return to semi-normal, but every three days the U.S. is still losing as many people as we lost on what had been the worst day in our history. “The Covid-19 victims who stare back from the newspapers aren’t martyrs; they’re haunting ghosts of our nation’s failure.”
We should learn from our successes and failures in the war on terrorism, said Jonah Bader in CNN .com. Following 9/11, the U.S. faced a resilient and diffuse threat that quickly reconstituted after it was eradicated in one place. Success in stopping terrorist attacks came from vigilance, intelligence gathering, and “forging partnerships with countries around the world.” Sadly, President Trump has ignored those lessons, said Greg Sargent in
The Washington Post. Before the pandemic struck, Trump rightly avoided launching new foreign wars, and criticized neoconservative elites for reacting to 9/11 by leading the nation into a series of catastrophic conflicts. But now he’s “presiding over his own form of massive elite policy failure, one that has killed more Americans than 9/11 and the militarized overreaction to it many times over.”
Rather than assigning blame, said EJ Montini in The Arizona Republic, let’s use the 9/11 anniversary to recall a time when this country could still unite in common purpose. Such unity must still be possible. Let’s also take stock of how much we’ve achieved in 19 years, said Jim Geraghty in NationalReview.com. “Osama bin Laden is fish food,” al Qaida hasn’t mounted a serious attack since 2015, and ISIS has been routed. “Evil will always exist,” but it certainly seems as if “at least some hard-line Islamists” have learned that attacking the U.S. “is just not an effective way to get what they want.”