Dread of the unknown lingered after 9/11 attacks

Threats to freedom never went away; we must face them as Americans

What does 9/11 mean to you? Not on a personal level but as an American?

On a personal level, everyone remembers where they were and how they heard the news. We remember the shock and the sadness.

The hardest thing to explain to those too young to remember is not the shock or the deep sorrow of that dark day.

Rather, the hardest thing to convey is that feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop: What’s coming next? We didn’t know. Was 9/11 the culmination of the plot or merely the first step in a series of attacks?

Now, of course, we all know it was a one-day attack; there was no catastrophic knockout blow to follow.

But we didn’t know that then, and it is that feeling of dread in the unknown that weighed heavily on everyone except those who simply shut it out of their minds and dared not think about it.

What would await us when we turned on the news the next morning, 9/12?

Almost immediately, the media, as is their wont, began to tell us in detail all the horrible things that al-Qaeda, which most people had never heard of before, wanted to do us.

They wanted to poison our water supply, they wanted to blow up our electrical grid, they wanted to release deadly pathogens on our subways.

They wanted to detonate a suitcase nuclear bomb in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, killing tens of thousands and rendering the entire region uninhabitable.

It all seemed unthinkable — but before 9/11, hijacked planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was unthinkable.

For a month after the attacks, we held our breath each morning when we turned on the news.

You notice I used the first-person plural pronouns “us” and “we” because, as at no other time in my life, we were “we” — united Americans.

That is why I ask what 9/11 means to you as an American. For me, for the first time, I understood the precarious nature of freedom.

Ronald Reagan said the loss of freedom is never more than one generation away, but I didn’t truly get that until 9/11.

It was not so much that I envisioned a country ruled by al-Qaeda under its 7th Century vision of Sharia Law. But rather the real possibility that what we have, our way of life, could slip away.

We have a big, open, free country. You cannot stop every attacker, especially one willing to die for the cause.

Would we be able to fly again? How can we possibly keep every single plane safe? What about the hundreds of college football stadiums filled with fans on Saturday afternoons in autumn?

Will they really make one of our major urban centers radioactive?

When I was a kid, we had the Cold War. But I never really felt that sense of dread reading about the Soviet Union. They seemed to my 10-yearold mind unlikely to nuke us, knowing we would nuke them.

But the terrorists believed a better world awaited those who brought down the Great Satan.

I was proud of how we as

Americans came together after the attacks. As time went by, our young people in the military performed magnificently, but our leaders didn’t always make the best decisions.

The dread gradually faded, and disunity took its place. “Us” became our political party, and “them” became the other political party.

Now, in some ways, we are back to 9/10. There are still terrorists who want to kill us, to destroy our way of life, and we must face the challenges to our freedom.

It would be nice to see us face them together, as Americans.