FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Re: Fear mongering
[Rod Dreher 03/29 12:16 PM]I should probably say something personal about my tendency toward alarmism. While it is true that I’m very much a “Slouching Toward Gomorrah” kind of guy, I can see that I was strongly affected by September 11. For me personally, the biggest lesson of that day was that everything you think is solid and safe can disappear in a single morning. I’ve told the story before, so I won’t go into it in detail again, but I will never forget as long as I live the experience of that morning. When I walked out my front door on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the towers burning, I ran for the Brooklyn Bridge, to get over to the site to cover the story. Within the hour, I stood on the far side of the bridge watching the south tower collapse. Seconds before it came down, a NYPost colleague told me not to go down there, that those things were going to fall. I looked at her with total sincerity and conviction, and said, “Come on, that’s the World Trade Center, they’re not going to fall.”
Nothing that ever happened to me was as traumatic as what followed, and I’ve spent a long time since then thinking about the hour’s walk from my house to the other side of the bridge, and how my mind could not accept the full meaning of what my eyes were actually seeing. Of course, as we now know we all had ample warning that this kind of thing was being planned, and was possible. We collectively refused to take Islamic terrorism and extremism with appropriate seriousness, and in my opinion, we have not changed. I am fascinated by willful blindness — including my own; I have reproached myself many times for being unwilling to take seriously the warnings prior to the Iraq War that the US would inherit a fractured country that would tend to a civil war we couldn’t control. I didn’t want to see that, because I was so eager to see someone, anyone, pay for 9/11. But that’s another story. The point is, since 9/11 I have become in many ways preoccupied with the idea that some rough history is headed our way, as Peggy Noonan put it, that we are unprepared for it, and are in fact living in ways that make it difficult even to think about preparing for what could happen. I know, I know, you can’t spend your whole life worrying about what might happen, but that’s no reason to prudently prepare, and to think about ways of addressing social and individual weaknesses now, while there is time, instead of waiting for the crisis moment to be upon us.
I will never forget how clear and blue the sky over New York harbor was on the morning of September 11.
(Now for something completely different: today’s anxiety is over the fact that this afternoon, a Washington Post Style section reporter is coming over to the house to hang out and cook dinner with us. We’re going to make a field trip to Whole Foods, in fact. What if he discovers my secret stash of Cheetos?)
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