According to a recent Pew poll, 97 percent of American adults said they remember where they were when the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks occurred.
I sure do: I was teaching an introductory course in American government. When I left for class, television stations were reporting that a commercial plane apparently crashed by accident into one of the Twin Towers in Downtown Manhattan; by the time class ended, both towers had fallen and the Pentagon was in flames.
There will be many tributes this week and next to those who died 10 years ago. We will revisit the horror, the sorrow, and the shock of the attacks. Wreaths will be laid, speeches given. But as we pause a decade later to honor the dead, will we stop to more fully consider how the intervening 10 years transformed us as a nation?
We have become more cautious and suspicious, and there is evidence beyond the heightened security at airports. Most of us raised little to no objection to government searches of our phone records, or to increased electronic and video surveillance. Our passports now have embedded tracking devices. Freedom and privacy are often at odds with security, but never has that trade-off been made as plain as during the past decade.
Pre-Sept. 11 fears about border security have also escalated. In a nation that has long prided itself on welcoming the world's immigrants, many Americans now seem less certain about retaining our role as the beacon to which the world is drawn. Outsiders suddenly seem more exotic and, by extension, more threatening. There is loose, unfounded talk about surreptitious plans to impose Sharia law within America.
We also seem more unsure about the proper forward posture we should take around the globe. In terms of force, we have hardly hesitated to prosecute war or initiate violence. In the past year we have deployed killer drones in at least six nations: Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, but also Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Pakistan. At the same time, within a few short years after the fateful attacks, Americans scarred by the Bush administration's unnecessary and costly invasion of Iraq quickly have developed a rather low tolerance for full-scale war.
Sacrifice? The refusal to roll back President George W. Bush's pre- and post-Sept. 11 tax cuts, and President Barack Obama's later extension of those cuts, testifies to our unwillingness to bear the financial burden of paying for wars, be they covert or declared. Tributes that require words but not dollars cheapen talk of sacrifice, especially when defense spending nearly doubled during the past decade without the taxes to pay for it — an explosion in both the size of government and its debts curiously overlooked by tea party types. Slapping a "Support the troops" bumper sticker on a gas-guzzling SUV is patriotism on discount.
We pointed fingers at each other, too. With cause, liberals reminded conservatives that, sure, freedom isn't free — but that doesn't mean we ought to trample on our liberties in order to save them. With cause, conservatives reminded liberals that even if only a tiny fraction of Muslims become terrorists, that doesn't mean we should turn a blind, culturally relativist eye to the fact that in too many Islamic countries, women are regarded as second-class citizens. Neither side is without blame; both ought to know better.
We hear constantly that the Sept. 11 attacks "changed everything." But did they, really? Yes, much about our country and our citizenry changed. But not everything.
We briefly became a more unified people, but there is ample evidence that we are as divided today as ever. The attacks made us rethink our place in the world, but we remain the planet's lone superpower and continue to flex our hegemonic muscles accordingly. According to Pew, after the attacks, slightly more than half of Americans supported sacrificing civil liberties for security, whereas now slightly more than half hold the opposing view — but, overall, we remain split on the question of how to simultaneously protect ourselves and our values.
As we take time out in the coming days to remember that fateful, horrible day and to honor those who died, keep in mind that, for better or worse, Sept. 11 did change us — but not nearly as much as we might like to believe.
Thomas F. Schaller teaches political science at UMBC. His column appears every other Wednesday. His mail is schaller67@gmail.com.