...Believe him. Yesterday, Tam wrote about the futility of forever lamenting the attacks of 11 September 2001. Terrible things have happened throughout our history, and we remember them -- the burning of Washington, the entirety of our Civil War, the San Francisco earthquake, the Pearl Harbor attack.... We remember them, yet few now weep over American losses during WW I; the original import of 11 November is not well-remembered or much understood.
We remember, but the sorrow has faded. Anger has been replaced by reason and, I hope, a lesson in caution.
11 September 2001 was preceded by 26 February 1993. Pearl Harbor followed a long period of aggressive expansion by Imperial Japan. The Weather Underground kept on bombing for years even after several of their number blew themselves up, petering out over hard-Left infighting. And the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing served notice that extremists on the Right are just as capable of violence as the Left, in some ways presaging the rise of a far more confrontational Right in the United States.
Performative tears are touching, but learning lessons from the events that prompt them are more valuable than any black armband or solemn speech of remembrance. Maintaining civil society takes work. Maintaining civil society requires an open dialog. Blowing things up, trying to knock down the underlying structures of our system of government, is not a path to reform.
There is plenty of hard work for responsible adults and they're not always going to agree on the details. We have mechanisms for working out least-bad solutions -- and when we shortcut or spurn them, things are likely to go askew. (How long did it take us to run Osama bin Laden to ground? How many wrong turns did we take?) "I don't like it; burn it all down" is the destroyer's approach -- radical Islamists, random nutjobs, home-grown communists and backyard fascists all alike. Time to grow up, leave fantasy for entertainment, roll up our sleeves and live in reality.
"Maintaining civil society requires an open dialog."
ReplyDeleteOpen dialogue seems to always wind up in a nasty comment section.
I think maintaining a civil society requires you more often to keep your mouth closed.
"Civil," I said. We need the freedom to speak civilly with one another -- and the good sense to freeze out the uncivil.
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