Day of Infamy Numbs Us All

The column I originally wrote for this issue may show up another time, when my passion for things commercial or political returns. After Sept. 11, everything seems small and irrelevant. Especially me.

After Sept. 11, evil will be measured against a different scale than we used back in the halcyon days of Oklahoma City and Columbine. Sept. 11, 2001, will be remembered like Dec. 7, 1941. It needs its own name like Krystalnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass,” those nights in November 1938 when thousands of Jewish-owned businesses, homes and synagogues were destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jews were arrested in Nazi Germany. My son, who is far too young to have to consider such things, heard speculation at school that Sept. 11 was chosen because of its numeric date, 9-1-1. I told him I knew of no special significance, but 9-1-1 might be a good way to refer to the entire episode: the day of national emergency.

The sheer waste is infuriating — of precious human life and human potential, of property, of energy, of emotion and of genius. Imagine the good that could have come from the shrewd minds able to plan and execute this attack.

Here at Arkansas Business, our response to the mind-numbing news was to do what we do. We tried to gather as much information as possible on local events related to the only news of the day — buildings closing, gas lines forming, hotels filling up with displaced airline passengers. It seemed the only way to be useful, and I was thankful that we have a daily news product on the Internet (arkansasbusiness.com) and an e-mail list of 4,500 subscribers. A year ago, Arkansas Business was strictly a weekly newspaper, and we would have been completely helpless — and useless.

Still, what I was doing seemed a completely inadequate response to an attack on all of us. Many of us eventually will find that we suffered losses of which we aren’t yet aware, but on Sept. 11 it didn’t feel like I was suffering enough or sacrificing enough.

The last time I felt this way was during the Persian Gulf War, my only wartime experience as an adult. When the first President Bush talked about getting other countries to share the cost of Operation Desert Storm, I kept hoping he would ask the American public to share it as well. In those days, the federal government was already running deep deficits. I thought maybe an increase in the federal gasoline tax was in order. I had heard stories from my parents of rationing during World War II, and I had seen enough old movies to know that there were recycling efforts and victory gardens and war bonds. I thought our government should have asked us to do something tangible like that … something more than wearing flag pins and listening to Lee Greenwood sing “God Bless the USA.”

But we were never asked to make a direct sacrifice, and I think the country missed out on a unifying experience. I hope the new President Bush will call upon us to do something useful, sacrificial and unifying. We were all attacked, and we should all be part of the national response.

After 9-1-1, our lives are going to be changed in ways small and large. When our intelligence community succeeds in placing blame for this treachery, and I believe it will, we will likely be asked to accept the unpleasant fact that war, like rain, falls on the just and the unjust. President Bush alluded to this when he said the United States would make no distinction in its retaliation between the perpetrators and those who harbor them. The role of aggressor against civilians is not one that comes easily to Americans, especially when we’ve been sold a bill of goods about “smart bombs,” and accepting that role may be the largest sacrifice we make.

We likely will be asked to accept smaller sacrifices. Some of us can give blood, travelers can endure a bit more inconvenience when boarding airlines and we can all eventually expect increased insurance rates due to heavy losses by commercial and personal lines and workers’ comp carriers.

Still, I am waiting for our president to tell us what to do, how to make a positive contribution, how to be relevant. Even here in the flyover region of America, I feel like saying, “Ich bin ein New Yorker.”