The World’s Different, and So Are We

On the upcoming first anniversary of Sept. 11, it’s worth noting not just how the world has changed in the last year but how Americans as individuals have changed personally. After all, Sept. 11 was something we took very personally. But, looking back, it seems clear that we surprised the rest of the world with our reaction.

Certainly there was some of the predictable “woe is me,” and a bit of the teary “why us?” victimology in the immediate aftermath. But that was our shock registering, more than anything else--the sound of our geopolitical ignorance and our hermetic complacency crashing to the ground along with their symbolic stone equivalents, the Twin Towers.

Nationalism was quickened by injury. A sharp wound to the ego made us jump. We howled and stamped our feet like spoiled children disciplined at last. To be fair, however, all this passed quickly, given the scope of the event, and gave way to something much more private and, arguably, much more quintessentially American than bratty backlash or haughty solidarity.

We took what happened on Sept. 11 and put it in the context of each and every one of our lives the way you do only when confronted with some purely subjective twist of fate or catastrophic near miss that leaves you scrambling to pick up the pieces.

We asked ourselves what was and remains perhaps the hardest question at the heart of this national tragedy: What am I doing with my life? Not, what is my country doing?

Fundamentally, we asked something much more existential and productive, though we rarely, if ever, asked it out loud or talked about it with our friends. We asked: What am I--a single, accountable individual in society, a mortal nobody living out his or her days in quiet desperation--doing?

Not exactly the kind of thing you hear at the mall, much less expect from a bunch of supposedly insulated consumerists, but there it was on the table when we were all sitting up nights or staring out the window in the middle of the day.

Scratch most Americans these days and you’ll find that many of them have made a big change in their lives in the last 12 months, something not obviously attributable to Sept. 11 but a response to it nonetheless.

It might be something as outwardly trivial as finally sticking to the Atkins diet, quitting smoking or taking up yoga. Then again, it might be something monumental like ending a decades-old bad marriage or quitting a cushy job to pursue a life in the arts. But whatever it is, the impetus behind the changes we made is essentially the same for everyone.

Deep down we all did it because we knew that it might have been us in those towers.

So what makes this so American? Because it’s our unique history. We are a nation made up largely of the children of penniless immigrants who once hopped a boat to terra incognita, landed often sick and in rags and pulled themselves up for generations by their proverbial bootstraps.

It’s immortalized in our literature as well. Ralph Waldo Emerson was not only guiding our individualist spirit but describing it when he wrote in his canonical essay “Self-Reliance”: “Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design.... Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within.”

We have found rigor under duress, shown our mettle to be made perhaps of sterner stuff than our detractors thought.

We have been modest heroes to ourselves, and that, for what it’s worth, has made all the difference.