Shock Waves
After a shared national tragedy, what comes next?
`Everything will be different from now on." Or so says Tom Edelmann, a lawyer for a St. Louis bank. The sentiment was repeated again and again last week. As the horror sank in--and the enormity of the attacks came into focus--Americans from all over the country and all walks of life sensed that their world had changed. Any lingering illusions of national invulnerability were shattered. "I'm realizing life is never going to be the same," says Joseph Wanco, a restaurant owner in Wellfleet, Mass. "It's just a loss of innocence."
A loss of innocence, certainly. But also, possibly, the gain of things more valuable: realism, a sense of national unity and purpose, and even wisdom. Securing those will depend on how Americans respond to the challenges in the weeks, months, and years ahead, and many have already reacted in encouraging ways. From heroic acts of rescue to extensive volunteer efforts to a run on American flags at stores, people are displaying a civic and patriotic spirit that many social analysts had thought was lost.
Cause for hope. Many are turning to faith and sacred traditions for courage and guidance--and finding both. Even custodians of popular culture have shown admirable discretion and restraint, postponing baseball and other national pastimes; Hollywood and the networks have rescheduled violent fare. There have been troubling signs, of course, including senseless and cowardly attacks on Arab-Americans, Muslims, and others. Americans will have to be as wise about the measures they resist as the ones they embrace. But the discernment and good sense that many have shown in the early aftermath of unspeakable horrors give greatest cause for hope beyond the immediate tragedy.
Americans will certainly need all the judgment they can muster as they confront an elusive and problematic foe. "In Pearl Harbor, we knew our enemy, and they struck at the military," says Donald Hunt, 79, a World War II veteran and survivor of that attack. "This time around, we don't know our enemy, and they struck at innocent people." Compounding the problem, says Walter Reich, a professor of international affairs, ethics, and human behavior at George Washington University, is that "the enemy here is not a country but a cause without a specific address that is mobilized against us--against our very identity."
That kind of foe creates painful dilemmas. "We're going to have to respond in ways that threaten to undermine the very values and culture that enrage the people who attack us," says Reich. "This forces us to reconsider decisions we have already made--decisions about extrajudicial measures such as assassinations and other actions."
Those decisions are already being reconsidered, both in Congress and in the larger arena of public opinion. Whether intelligence agencies will return to such measures as working with "unsavory" members of terrorist cells remains to be seen. Mel Goodman, a former CIA analyst and now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, counsels caution and says that the real intelligence need is more and better analysis of the huge amounts of information. He does admit, however, that he thinks that relying on so many official State Department covers for clandestine information gathering is a waste of human resources. "How are they going to collect information about terrorists when they are working out of embassies?" he asks.
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