Americans’ Reaction to Attacks Shows True State of the Union

Outgoing New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who got so much else right after Sept. 11, showed perfect pitch again in his farewell address last week when he predicted the ruins of the World Trade Center would take their place with other enduring monuments to American sacrifice and valor like Valley Forge, Gettysburg and Normandy. “This is going to be a place that’s remembered a hundred and a thousand years from now,” he said.

What will make the site so memorable is not only the sudden searing wound that it suffered on the morning of Sept. 11. It’s what happened after, the countless acts of heroism, compassion and charity that followed day after day as the entire nation coalesced to help the families and the city recover.

That’s what makes this year so memorable too. Sept. 11 was one of the worst days in U.S. history. But it has been followed by many days that witnessed America at its best. This terrible test has shown the country to be stronger, more rooted and more connected than cultural critics on the left or the right had expected.

For years, left and right have leveled an array of indictments against the state of American society. One by one, the country’s response to Sept. 11 has knocked them down.

Before the attacks, it had become commonplace to complain that America had grown too cynical to trust its leaders. Yet the nation has rallied around President Bush as unreservedly as it has behind any wartime president. Bush deserves credit for striking a unifying tone from the outset; at key moments, he has seemed to be not so much speaking to, as for, America. But the surge of support he’s received from millions of Americans who voted against him also showed that the instinct to enlist behind the president at a moment of crisis is as powerful today as it was in earlier generations.

Other fears have fallen. On the right, there had been a long-standing suspicion that Americans had grown too jaded to salute the flag. Flags now flutter everywhere, not just on pickups, but Volvos. Some on the left have long seen America as an irredeemably racist society. Yet the country has stopped far short of a draconian backlash against Arab or Muslim Americans. Have there been individual examples of prejudice? Sure. But the dog that didn’t bark this fall was any major upsurge in violence or intimidation of Arab Americans.

That instinct toward tolerance has tended to marginalize those who have tried to use the attacks as a cudgel in our domestic political arguments. Televangelist Jerry Falwell was widely condemned when he implied the attacks represented a form of divine retribution for our acceptance of homosexuality and abortion. Conservative social critics such as Shelby Steele likewise have gotten almost no traction for their attempts to blame John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, on modern education or social liberalism. Americans seem to understand that in this dangerous world, they have enough real enemies abroad without trying to fabricate new ones at home.

Perhaps the best news has come on the front where critics made their most important case against American society. For years, the keenest cultural critics on left and right have been arguing that America had lost the thread of community. We were, in these portraits, a nation “bowling alone,” laying waste our energies with getting and spending, isolated, materialistic, shallow.

That picture has undeniable elements of truth. But post-Sept. 11, it clearly needs serious revision. The unprecedented torrent of charitable contributions for the families of the victims is only the most visible evidence that Americans are not nearly as self-absorbed as the critics feared. The more telling measures are both more subtle and profound. More subtle as in the volunteers who stand out on New York’s West Side Highway each day waving encouragement to the rescue workers as they drive toward their grim and grueling labors. More profound as in the passengers of Flight 93 who sacrificed their lives so that their plane could not be used to kill others.

Ironically, before Sept. 11, Bush was planning to focus on an initiative called “communities of character.” The idea was to find ways to encourage Americans to more actively participate in their community. It turns out Americans didn’t need as much encouragement as the White House thought. Now, says one senior White House aide, the initiative is being reworked to tap the vibrant post-Sept. 11 instinct toward civic engagement with ideas such as new opportunities for voluntarism and national service.

The attack hasn’t bridged all divisions. Lines of race, class and ethnicity still separate Americans in their daily lives. Politically, we remain two countries, split almost exactly in half on the key domestic choices--as the razor-thin result of the 2000 presidential election demonstrated. Solidarity in wartime doesn’t demand that Congress and the country suppress those deeply held domestic differences.

Yet the lesson of the last three-plus months is that those differences are only the seams in a much larger web of shared beliefs and priorities. That simple truth should frame our political disputes in their proper proportion. Before Sept. 11, it wasn’t unusual for the most fervid partisans in each party to view the other side as almost un-American, or at least as an affront to the country’s fundamental values. (That tendency reached a rabid peak in the conservative portrayal of President Clinton.)

After Sept. 11, it should be clear that whatever our disagreements about guns or abortion or taxes, a powerful consensus extends across American society about our obligations to one another and to the nation itself when it’s under assault. What unites America turns out to be much more profound than what divides it.

Which is perhaps the lasting message in this tragedy. In his speech last week, Giuliani proposed to build a memorial at ground zero in New York that would allow anyone who comes to it “to feel the great power and strength and emotion of what it means to be an American.” A memorial is a fine idea. But even without a statue or plaza, millions of Americans have already experienced, or been reminded of, exactly the feelings Giuliani evoked. Across the country, this awful crucible is forging a renewed sense of connection and common purpose. And that makes 2001 a year defined not only by sorrow, but hope.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: http://161.35.110.226/brownstein.