On Sept. 11 we lost not just lives and concrete buildings, but a way of life.
Personal freedoms, or what some considered personal freedoms, were suddenly suppressed in airports. Fear, rampant as the rubble still smoldered in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, only peaked as letters filled with anthrax made their rounds. Racial profiling, once frowned upon, was suddenly left for debate as if it was an option on the table.
Not all of these things persisted, but a threat that had long existed in our society came to fruition: our apathy. When tales of extraordinary rendition (the transfer of prisoners outside the U.S., where laws governing interrogation are less stringent), illegal domestic wiretapping and torture by our government surfaced, no one took to the streets in sizes similar to the rallies held over the past year. When it became clear that we had waged war on false pretenses, we simply accepted an unbearable fact and moved on. When we were made aware that there was a detention center in Cuba depriving detainees of the very rights we were spilling our nation’s blood for, there were few rallying calls heard in the halls of our public conscience.
Tom Junod, Esquire magazine’s writer-at-large, once wrote that the decade we live in is the decade of the “Moral Bubble,” and that it “will not be pricked until we take responsibility not just for the forty-third president’s actions but for our ‘inaction’ — for all the agreements we’ve made without awareness, for all the awareness we’ve come to without vigilance, for all the times we’ve touched the easy, insulating button of our assent.”
It wouldn’t be fair to dump any or all of our nation’s moral shortcomings squarely on George W. Bush’s feet. In times of great crises and challenges, we tend to lose moral high ground as a society. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose head graces our dime, issued an executive order that forcibly relocated around 120,000 Japanese Americans to “war relocation camps” during the World War II.
Yet even when we do freak out, even when we make real Adlai Stevenson’s dictum that “it is far easier to fight for principles than to live up to them,” we eventually redeem ourselves. It took 40 years after FDR’s Japanese internment camps for our government to offer a legal apology to the families of those interned. And now, in 2009, it looks like we have once again found a way to cope with the shortcomings of our principles in the awful aftermath of Sept. 11.
Recently we have learned that many accused of organizing and implementing the Sept. 11 terror attacks will face trial, not in front of a military tribunal, but in front of a jury in New York City, just minutes from where the World Trade Center towers crumbled.
Every instinct tells me that we shouldn’t give those who have confessed to playing a role in Sept. 11 attacks any trial, much less a civilian trial or any other rights they continually wish to destroy. But in offering a civilian trial, we will show that we are no longer steeped in fear, afraid that a courthouse could become a target or turned into a public platform for espousing the wicked credo of those like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; that we are willing to judge not by whatever extreme fanatical sect of Islam the defendants belong to but by their heinous actions; and that we are willing to disclose any of the rash shortcomings of our principles that we made out of confusion and fear to show we are willing to learn from our mistakes.
This is what a free country does. It’s hard, sure, but quite frankly, I couldn’t think of a better justice for those who seek the end of our freedom than by showing how resilient we have become since that September morning eight years ago.
Matthew Christ is a political science sophomore. His column appears on Mondays.
