When the second jetliner plowed into the tower in New York, I turned to Cal Bloom, who was watching it all on the small TV in his barber shop, and said, “The world just changed.”
It was faster than an NBA pivot and dunk; the first plane was not an accident. The carnage was full of dark purpose, and there would be blood for blood, and again, and then again. It continues today.
Terrorism is not something that happens one day and then fades away. It becomes the defining fact in lives, and nations, and puts tentacles down into the nitty gritty dirty history of the world. It is the patriarch of generations of fear.
Any lingering smugness about being insulated from the kinds of warring that has been the legacy of other continents was scrubbed away when Americans were introduced on Sept. 11, 2001 to the collision of modern technology and medieval malice. Take hatred as old as the story of Cain and Abel and set the story in an era of airplanes and cellular phones and you have terror to go.
As easy as ordering a pizza.
Casualties were pulled from the rubble in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in middle America, farmland in western Pennsylvania. But they were only the first.
Casualties resulting from the acts of that day and rumors and lies and ignorance have tainted policy and politics ever since. Each new report inflates the numbers and sends the tallies off in strange directions, through small towns here and abroad, and in our heads wherever we pause and consider why things are as they are today.
Everything changed. The first order of the day — after vengeance — was to secure the borders and protect Americans in their homes and businesses. And the creation to achieve that was something called Homeland Security. I recall thinking at the time how “homeland” rang uncomfortably like “fatherland.”
Civilians were searched in airports with a combination of cold calculation and broad disassociation. Everyone was treated like a potential criminal, and the effect was to justify distrust as a new daily habit.
Of course, there were excesses, and lapses, and new problems were identified, so more training was put in place, and more layers of paramilitary personalities engaged to keep watch — both on the keepers of the watch, and the traveling public they were screening. Careers and bureaucracies were built.
The borders with Mexico were viewed as an open invitation to undesirable aliens from all over the world. Tighten the border, and hire more guards, with guns and dogs, and train them as you might train correctional officers.
Privatize the compounds where detainees would be housed and fed while the legal processes illegal entry were weighed against requests for sanctuary — an American promise increasing broken and blacked with the shame of corruption.
Families who raised children here but have some members whose status is in questions wait for a knock at the door from government agents. Sometimes some members of a family are taken away and then separated again. Small children have been taken from their mothers, because someone in power wants other Americans to feel safer.
The wrappings of civility are coming undone. Suspicion and doubt divides once-tranquil neighborhoods. Labels are used to define those who look or sound different from ourselves. Fear trumps curiosity about each other, and new arrivals are considered a threat before they can be deemed an opportunity for new friendships.
Most troubling is the return — not a change, really, but a lifting of the rock — to a time when political leadership capitalizes on fears.
A president is chosen on the basis of defining and preserving divisions instead of bringing ideals together for discussion and compromise. Absolutism, victory without compromise, is demanded and anything else is failure. Loyalty to the leader takes on the cloak of a cult. To listen to another point of view is seen as being soft on commitment to the base of zealots who fund campaigns and drive the rhetoric on social media.
History is a fickle watchdog. It barks for the last hand that feeds it, and bites anyone who takes it for granted.
Dean Minnich served two terms as a county commissioner after a career with newspapers in Pennsylvania, central Maryland, and Baltimore. He was a Navy photojournalist and spent three years in Asia, including duties in Vietnam, The Philippines, and Japan. Reach him at Dminnichwestm@gmail.com.