Editorial: one year later

Even in our happiest moments a sound, a name, a smell can bring it all back, breaking our reverie and hurtling us back to that terrible day.
For Echo staffers, who watched from our windows the destruction unfold two miles away, it is still impossible to turn onto Fifth Avenue without taking note of the void in the sky to the south. We reconstruct the World Trade Center towers in our mind’s eye. How tall did they stand on the horizon? Every day they become less vivid, like the memory of a lost loved one fading slowly with the passing of time. That empty place in Lower Manhattan mirrors the empty place in our national soul. More than 3,000 people lost their lives in the terror attacks in New York, the Pentagon, and in the skies over a farmer’s field in Southwestern Pennsylvania. But something died in all Americans that day.
It wasn’t our innocence that we lost on Sept. 11, 2001; that had been long gone, if it ever really existed. No, what we lost, what was destroyed as utterly as the Trade Center’s behemoth towers, was our sense of being safe and immune from the larger troubles of the world. That feeling was borne of a complacency that had grown slowly but surely, like the soft spread of middle age, in the years since the end of the Cold War. We were, as a nation, on a track to becoming neo-isolationists, engaging in the world, with one notable exception being Northern Ireland, only, it seemed, to feed our appetite for global capitalism. Meanwhile, we were excusing ourselves from almost every significant debate on those other pesky globals: poverty, pollution, arms proliferation, human rights.
Before Sept. 11, if a problem arose somewhere in the world that affected our interests, all we had to do was send in the Marines. But on Sept. 11, the problem was here. The Marines couldn’t help. Suddenly we were on our own, a nation looking everywhere and anywhere for answers and finding few.
In the days, weeks and months since, we recovered, mourned and buried our dead. Exceptional leaders emerged, like former Mayor Giuliani, whose calm, reassuring manner brought and kept us all together, helped us keep our perspective and restored our faith in the possible. We cleared even the smallest scrap of debris from the 17-acre Trade Center site at a speed thought impossible. In thousands of way, large and small, New Yorkers, and indeed all Americans, have redefined human resiliency.
The year since Sept. 11, 2001 has seen us active on the global stage as well, but with mixed results. We went to war and overthrew the repressive regime that had given safe haven to our attackers. We engaged in the once scorned notion of nation building and today watch cautiously to see if our handiwork in Afghanistan will survive. And now the drums of war beat again as we consider whether to go it alone in a war against Iraq.
As we contemplate the uncertainties of the future, especially as we look to Iraq, Americans would do well to consider that the isolationism we now understand we must reject is a two-sided coin. One side is, of course, disengagement, the other is unilateral action. So it is heartening to finally hear dissenting voices rising in government, voices that were regrettably missing from the tepid debate on national security that resulted in the erosion of our civil liberties in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. We simply have to realize that to eradicate the scourge of terrorism in the world requires nations working together, sharing resources and intelligence, and using diplomacy, not force, as the first resort, even against the most brutal, dangerous and intransigent dictator.
In his State of the Union speech last January, President Bush recognized the difficulties ahead when he said: “In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want a nation that serves goals larger than self. We’ve been offered a unique opportunity and we must not let this moment pass.”
As a nation we need to take those strong and eloquent words to heart. That is our challenge as we look to Sept. 11, 2003.