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BIG CITY: Aftermath, part one

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Staff

Kirk Ross

Last year around this time, I described a little of what life was like here on that fateful Tuesday in September 10 years ago. Like a lot of folks, the attacks themselves are burned into memory thanks to a relentless replaying of the images of panic and violence and loss.

Ten years later, I have a hard time remembering those images and the tragic events of that day in isolation. As a chronicler of what came next, it did not take long before the consequences here and abroad started to play out.

We think of the response to 9/11 as more international in nature because the long wars that resulted have so consumed our attention and the media’s. But there were serious repercussion at home and very quickly.

As the Carolina community reeled from the attacks, the response was, initially, to heal. We all joined hands on Polk Place on Wednesday, and a memorial to those connected to the university who had lost their lives was started when, at the close of the ceremony, each attendee was invited to place a small stone near where the flagpole now stands.

It wasn’t much later that a series of discussions and teach-ins started. And then we all learned very quickly how rapidly xenophobic and anti-Islam the nation had turned, when the attempt to try to understand the events of 9/11 became, in the eyes of many critics, treasonous. Educators with expertise in the Arab world who tried to lay out the motivations were attacked as sympathizers. A blacklist from an academic watchdog group associated with Lynne Cheney and Sen. Joe Lieberman surfaced naming names and taking statements out of context to mislabel academics. The list was later re-issued with the names of educators redacted, but the damage was done, and several individuals were rightly concerned about their safety.

There were, naturally, some people who did seem to cheer on the terrorists, but they were few and scattered around the country, and the people vilified on our campus were not among them. But in a pattern that hasn’t stopped, anyone who didn’t embrace the position of the president was seen as un-American. In the fever pitch of outrage and anger, hate itself became acceptable. And it still is in some circles.

The world that many of the academics who were attacked had spent a career attempting to enlighten us about suddenly became very simple: black and white, us and them, good and evil. In the words of the president, you were either with us or against us. When I hear people wax poetic about how proud they were of this country on Sept. 12, I can’t help thinking that some of them mean a country with no dissent, a country that doesn’t question its leaders or try to understand the world around us, a country many of us steeped in the ideals of America wouldn’t recognize.
Sinclair Lewis’ long-ago warning seemed to be playing out: “When fascism comes to America,” he wrote, “it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”

Now we’ve had ten years of babbling by people who have made a career of jingoism in the name of patriotism. Dissent is in vogue not just because the current occupant of the White House is of a different party, but because he is painted as an “other” and hating others is an established industry. And for those clinging to that simple world of black and white, he’s hated because he dares to talk about the gray areas that disappeared in the fall of 2001 and for trying to undo some of the damage done during an era of unchecked anger and vitriol. Some people aren’t ready for that even ten years later. And some never will be.

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