Ten Years

I've seen this weekend coming on my calendar for about six weeks now, and I've been trying to figure out what I was going to say about the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I don't want to rehash the events of the day and how they affected me. I already did that in a post on the anniversary two years ago. I've decided, instead, that I'd rather write about how we've changed as a country in the last ten years.

It isn't going to be a pleasant post to write...

Ten years ago, the United States seemingly was on top of the world. Sure, the stock market had been down for a few months, there were even whispers of a possible coming recession and of a "tech bubble" that might have started a year or two before, but overall we were feeling pretty good. The last remaining Superpower, we were told. The world's mightiest military. The policeman of the world. Heck, we were the moral conscience of the world! It didn't feel like we were just boasting when we declared the United States the greatest country in the world.

But September 11 shook us, and I don't think we've recovered yet. And I'm certainly not proud of how this nation has handled itself over the last ten years. We started a war that we had no business starting, a war which needlessly killed thousands of U.S. soldiers and tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, some who were pretty bad guys and probably deserved what they got, but most who were just in the wrong country at the wrong decade. We've become xenophobic, suspicious of anyone who looks like they're from the Middle East (When I first grew my beard, a co-worker warned me that I was just asking to get stopped at airports. "You look like a raghead terrorist!" he told me, with no apparent awareness that he was being insulting), ready to picket and legislate to keep mosques out of our towns. In an effort to keep our economy humming, we loosened regulation and lowered interest rates, in the process encouraging predatory lending and allowing "robber barons" to get rich from the pain of others while almost driving our economy into ruins. And after a few months of solidarity immediately following 9/11, our political atmosphere, which had been a little tense anyway thanks to the close nature of the Bush/Gore election, has become absolutely poisonous, so much so that the two parties couldn't even work together to raise the debt ceiling without negatively impacting our economy.

As the world's only Superpower, we didn't act so super.

No matter, I guess. No one calls us the only Superpower anymore. We've lost our coveted AAA rating. These days people talk about China as a nation that will soon be running the world. And just this past week the World Economic Forum ranked the United States--the supposed greatest country in the world--FIFTH in global competitiveness. If the attacks on September 11 humbled us and made us feel weak, the last ten years have been even worse.

But I don't mean to be so negative.

More than once in my life I've nearly been in catastrophic car accidents. It's not that I'm a bad driver. Yes, some of the near accidents were my fault; most were the fault of the other driver. But regardless of that, after the honking of horns, the wildly spinning vehicle, the screams and shouts of terror, the slamming of brakes, I always ended up in the same place--pulled over on the side of the road, out of breath and wide eyed, adrenaline coursing through my body. And once my heart beat finally slowed and I felt ready to continue, I'd pull back into traffic, but I was always overly cautious and over reactive as a result. For the next few minutes of driving, every driver who switched lanes without signaling freaked me out and caused me to jerk the steering wheel in a panic. I wasn't driving the way I normally drove, and I probably was a WORSE driver for my hyper-reactivity.

I think that's what's been happening for the last ten years. A decade later, we're STILL not acting like ourselves because of September 11. These last ten years, the way we've all acted...that's not us. That's not America. We're better than this.

Eventually, and usually without my awareness, I would stop driving in an overly defensive manner. I guess I just decided that it was time to move on. After ten years, I hope that's what's going to happen to this country. We're going to get back to what made this country great. I hope in another ten years we'll have changed enough that we'll again be able to say we're the greatest country in the world, and it will again not feel like boasting, but a simple statement of fact.