On the morning of September 11th, 2001, footage of the second plane struck me as palpably as a punch to the gut. In those early hours, the unknowable death toll played second fiddle to the more immediate question of whether the attacks would stop. Was this another Pearl Harbor? The start of World War III? I was a long way from New York, but as a twenty-something engaged to be married that fall, I spent the day ruminating on everything I’d ever heard about military drafts and war widows. I was afraid, in a way I had never experienced before and have not experienced since–an urgent and immediate fear not only for myself, or those trapped in the burning towers, but for everyone on the planet. No other event in my lifetime has furnished sufficiently compelling evidence of the impending end of everything.
Naturally, this reveals more about my life than it does about the world. The Cold War ended before I understood what it was. I have never been a soldier or (yet!) lived in a country torn by civil war; I have never confronted greater personal danger than a metropolitan freeway commute. But a religious upbringing primed me to identify “signs of the times.” I can still remember my first taste of apocalypse anxiety–it was November 3, 1992. As a tween, I knew little of eschatology and less of politics (if more, perhaps, than most “cuspers”). Even so, like many Christians in the years approaching the new millennium, I was often assured of the imminence of Parousia. My parents were not prone to flights of cataclysmic augury, but they (and, consequently, I) often kept company with adults who were. So it happened that as the polls closed on the elder Bush’s re-election bid, I overheard a friend of the family calling the game. “It’s the end of days,” she said. “Bill Clinton is going to destroy America. The Second Coming is just around the corner.” She spoke with such conviction. This was a respected woman, a leader in our community, an adult whose wisdom was to be trusted and admired. If she thought Bill Clinton was the literal Antichrist, the harbinger of destruction prophesied in the Revelation to John, well–who was I to doubt it?
Fortunately, there were other, calmer adults in my life, adults who had already lived through more convincing brushes with Judgment Day. They had once regarded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as an existential threat, but by the 1980s it was a hapless and bumbling foe, associated more closely in my psyche with punchlines than with breadlines. When the Soviet government collapsed in 1991, no one seemed surprised–sic semper Commies was surely their view. Did Russian children think it was the end of the world? In those days, the question would not have occurred to me. Adults who lived through the Cold War in its entirety assured me that the future was both bright and extraterrestrial, and the United States was leading the way. Biosphere 2, conveniently located in my home state of Arizona, heralded the construction of permanent moon bases and eventual terraforming of Mars. Computers and robotics featured heavily in this Baconian vision, and my grandfather–an aerospace engineer who contributed expertise to the Lunar Excursion Module–often spoke of the yet-untapped potential of computers and robotics. His brother would inevitably append–“And don’t pine for the good old days, either, because there was nothing good about them. Things are much better now. Outhouses were terrible!” I assume that, as a veteran of World War II, his distaste for the past extended to more than just outhouses, but that was always the example he chose. Then Grandpa would add malnutrition and disease to the list. “People are much healthier now,” he would say, holding forth at length on rickets, goiter, or polio–and how we beat them with milk, table salt, and the power of medical research. I was living in an age of technological marvels, and the Greatest Generation wanted me to know it.
Their competition was a seemingly inexhaustible stream of pop existential concern. With the Cold War (apparently) over, the threat of nuclear holocaust weighed a little lighter on the minds of the Boomers responsible for my education. Instead, they warned me about overpopulation and ozone depletion. Cartoons warned me about pollution and deforestation. The evening news warned me about overconsumption and Y2K. I admit these forecasts inspired–in the parlance of my youth–no fear. Perhaps, like many teenagers, I just had an imperfectly developed sense of contingency. Whatever the case, the optimism of my ancestors prevailed over the pessimism of the zeitgeist–at least until some people did something to the New York City skyline.
Just the same, my personal fears proved unfounded. Twenty years later it seems safe to say that the fervid catspaws of Osama bin Laden did not herald the apocalypse. What they did herald was a climate of unremitting fear: in the wake of what we colloquially abbreviate to “9/11,” the United States Congress expanded the American surveillance apparatus with the PATRIOT Act and authorized the use of U.S. Armed Forces to “deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.” These overwhelmingly bipartisan blank checks to the executive branch have since underwritten too much tragedy to list. The PATRIOT Act, as well as the AUMF, remain (at this writing) unrepealed, even though Osama bin Laden is dead and our adventure in Afghanistan has come to an unconvincing close. Google Ngrams, a tool for tracking the frequency of words and phrases in publication, shows a dramatic post-9/11 increase in use of the word “afraid” and the phrase “politics of fear.” Twenty years on, neither has regressed to the 20th century mean.
This is particularly noteworthy given President Barack Obama’s 9/11 decennial remark that “They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear.” There are times when this is surely true. “The Star-Spangled Banner,” national anthem of the United States, identifies our country as the “home of the brave.” United Airlines Flight 93 is perhaps the canonical example. Having learned of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, passengers stormed the cockpit, bringing the plane down before it could reach its likely target in Washington, D.C. None survived, but their courage and self-sacrifice secures their place in the annals of great American heroes. They were not soldiers or law enforcement officers; they were Americans who decided that if they were going to go down, they were going to go down fighting.
But while we may exhibit an ethnic propensity for rising to the occasion when our backs are to the wall, Americans routinely do not refuse to live in fear. Often, we absolutely wallow in it. Reporters use it to hawk their wares. Politicians wield it like a cudgel against their opposition. In the midst of one of the worst pandemics in American history, too many of us are gleeful in the face of tragedy, or disappointed by good news–as though we enjoy living in constant terror, so long as our political opponents are losing face. In response, some Americans are relocating their families to places they feel less afraid. I recently met a new neighbor whose sole purpose for moving to Florida was “more freedom.” It was sobering to receive this explanation, not from someone fleeing a failed state or tyrannical autocracy, but from someone fleeing Seattle, Washington. Critics of my adopted home (and its governor, Ron DeSantis) will swiftly observe that there is a price tag on such bravery, with a cost measured in lives. That may well be true. But then, as bioethicist Alan Goldman once observed, “anything worth living for is worth dying for. To realize or preserve those values that give meaning to life is worth the risk of life itself.”
Risks can be mitigated, of course. With unprecedented speed, medical science furnished us with protection against the extant pandemic, in the form of vaccines that reduce both the spread and the severity of COVID-19. But just as 9/11 ushered in an era of “airport security theater,” COVID-19 has birthed a new kind of performative cowardice: medical security theater. Medical security theater is on display any time easy, visible action is taken for purposes of being seen to “do something,” rather than because such action is especially warranted by circumstance. For example, cloth and paper facemasks–long understood to be of real but minimal protection against viral spread–are more likely to be worn (or not) as an expression of social identity than in response to contextual health risks or benefits. That is an act of theater. Requiring young children, who are unlikely to keep face coverings appropriately secured, to wear masks anyway, in schools where they will be sharing poorly-ventilated indoor activities and mask-free mealtimes–is, as far as we know, theater. “Vaccine passports” are excellent theater, so long as forging vaccination records remains a trivial undertaking. Vaccine avoidance, too, is a species of medical security theater, a way of exaggerating possible harms to make a political point concerning ideology or autonomy. Some people have good medical reason to remain unvaccinated, but those whose reluctance is based on nothing more concrete than a legitimate understanding that rare side effects exist are indulging a kind of cowardice. Getting vaccinated anyway is, in that context, an act of bravery.
Medical security theater is objectionable because it prioritizes social signaling above genuine solutions. Solutions, in turn, require bravery–on which too many Americans appear to have run short. I do not know how to make America brave again. Perhaps it will help to explicitly observe that we were not uniformly brave in September of 2001, and are not uniformly cowards today. Indeed, one person’s cowardice may strike another as reasonable prudence. Thus, maintaining the space–the liberty–to exercise our bravery and our autonomy in pluralistic ways is surely an important feature of wise policy. But the tripartite ideals of liberal society call also for fraternity, a willingness in our pluralism to work together toward goals (like public health) that are important to us all. Twenty years before COVID-19, cowards tested the mettle of the United States of America. If we passed that test, it was surely by the slimmest of margins, for every story of bravery to emerge from the wreckage can be matched with a story of equally shameful cowardice. Too often in our fear we harmed ourselves and other innocents, losing sight of our values and virtues along the way. My fear today is that we are repeating those mistakes. We should be celebrating the historically unprecedented rapidity with which effective vaccines emerged, promoting stories of scientific and medical heroism–not wielding threats of sickness and death as tools of social manipulation.
Granted, fear can be an effective goad, but it inevitably generates resentment of the fearmonger. If we’re going to go down fighting, it should be in the process of fighting our foes — not each other. The lesson of 9/11, two decades on, is clearly not that Americans refuse to live in fear. Too many of us (and our leaders) have made precisely that choice. Rather, the lesson of 9/11 is that the United States of America can still be the home of the brave, if only we will be persuaded to choose bravery for ourselves — rather than demanding it, under threat of law, from others. The mitigation of existential risk requires us first and foremost to not panic, to not succumb to the temptation to catastrophize, or entomb ourselves in the comfort of empty tribal gestures, or wield other people’s fear and superstition as a tool of political conquest. Whether the world and civilization ever do come to an end, the present reality is that the end is coming, individually and inevitably and all-too-often unexpectedly, for us all. Facing our fragility and living life anyway–not just preserving life, but living it to the very end, with our virtues and values intact–is the kind of bravery our reminiscence on 9/11 should inspire.
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