September 11 - Awakening the Spirit of America

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September 11: Awakening the Spirit of America

Late in September I found myself talking to Quaker kids: solid citizens all, more hard-working, serious, and responsible than 13-to-16-year-olds ought to be. But pacifists, mostly, and to a person they were worried, even scared. Bush had not yet delivered his "either with us or against us" speech, I think, but the message was abroad: school friends and others had given the teens to understand pretty clearly that criticism of the U.S. amounted to support for the terrorists. To their credit, few of the teens actually had kept silent, but they were closer to being intimidated than I would have imagined this formidable group of kids could be. Having aligned themselves with evil in their school's eyes, they felt that they could not speak safely.

But something odd is going on when national political leaders and people on the street respond to the September 11 attacks by repeating "They're wrong and we're right," and "This is no time for moral relativism - they are evil and we represent good." Did FDR, for example, need to point out that in opposing the Pearl Harbor attack we were right? Did Lincoln need to spell out his opposition to moral relativism? If not why are Bush, Giuliani et al. making such points so determinedly now? Is some broad U.S. public constituency arguing that the terrorists were right, or morally good? I've kept my ears open, and I have not heard one participant in the U.S. debate make that claim - not one. So who are the we're-right-they're-wrong-ers talking to? Well, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they're addressing folks who make the following sort of argument: "We have to ask why the terrorists did this. And when we ask that question we come up with a list of U.S. policies, from the deadly embargo on shipments to Iraq to our alliance with an Israeli state that has kept Palestinians homeless. Whatever response we make to the terrorist attacks should include a revision of those policies."

Why on earth does this look like the claim that the terrorists were right? Well, because it looks like the claim that we're wrong, about something. Apparently the inference is this: "If our policies were wrong, then the terrorists were right, and their acts were justified." Note the ironic convergence: none of the critics of U.S. policy make this inference, only (1) the new patriotic absolutists and (2) the terrorists themselves.

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