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Wednesday, September 11, 2002

What's a year been worth in America?

Are we safer today than we were on the achingly beautiful morning that was last Sept. 11?

Governor turned Superman Tom Ridge tells us we are "certainly" safer at the airport, and yet New York Daily News reporters spent the Labor Day weekend carrying box cutters, razors, knives and pepper spray onto 14 flights in 11 airports without arousing the post-Sept. 11 suspicions of "heightened" security.

Using carry-on bags, Daily News reporters Maki Becker, Greg Gittrich and their colleagues walked the handy elements of the terrorist arsenal past screeners at all four Sept. 11 airports and at Kennedy, LaGuardia, LAX, O'Hare and Las Vegas.

Are we stronger and more united than is suggested by the proven resilience of our emotions?

See Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia, Martha Stewart, et al. United we stand? Don't make me laugh. Corporate jackals stand with ordinary Americans only to devise new ways to pick their pockets.

Are we a more respected citizen in the world community, or are we respected less?

At the just-completed World Summit on Sustainable Development, representatives of the nations of the world continually watered down resolutions in the hope that the United States wouldn't simply ignore them. As we did the Kyoto Treaty on environmental responsibility.

Are we tuned into the causes of this solemn and slickly marketed one-year anniversary, to the intricate shifting winds of the global climate that beget colossal, unspeakable violence?

Do we understand that it's not all that hideous an oversimplification to posit that 9-11-01 would not have happened save for that fact that there are people on the planet without toilet paper, and there are some who have toilet paper with aloe?

What else, after all, makes Osama bin Laden such a charismatic figure in the so-called Arab street? To the frightened and the hateful, the people the Arab world has not prepared for modernity, bin Laden is Robin Hood. For a guy President Bush said could run "but he can't hide," he's doing a pretty good job of both. Even if he's dead, al-Qaida certainly isn't, and its top-level operatives are salivating at the opportunity an attack on Iraq would provide them to unite the entire Arab world against us.

Have we learned anything about the sophisticated requirements of what the president rightly called a new kind of warfare?

Not when the current military options seem so primitive (bomb somebody!). Iraq makes a fine target, but a poor solution. The only effective response to terror is global. Our own isolation only exacerbates our vulnerability.

Politics -- global, national, regional, local -- is essentially the social science that determines who gets what. Flawed global politics, myopic, selfish, intellectually dishonest, only gets so hot before it explodes. Nobody deserves to be at the center of it when it happens, but, always, somebody will be.

Nobody deserved to take the elevator to the 94th floor of the World Trade Center and then leap into the sky in panic a half-hour later. Nobody deserved to be sitting in an office at the Pentagon and have the world end over the first cup of coffee. Nobody deserved to be on an airplane thinking about a luscious destination such as San Francisco only to have to respond to Todd Beamer's "Let's roll" before he or she got to open the peanuts.

But have we done enough, in one year, to get out of the crosshairs of madmen? Have we done anything to lower global tension? Are we anywhere as sincere in that as we are in beating our chests? Are we anywhere as sincere in that as we are about ... football?

All America seems to really want is for Sept. 11 to go away. If you think America's been successful in fulfilling the online headline of the unrelentingly satirical Onion (A Grieving Nation Yearns to Return to Mindless Bulls --) prior to today, wait until you see the acceleration tomorrow. The Sopranos can't get here fast enough.

The chance for channeling America's best instincts has rotted on the vine.

What happened to the notion of compulsory public service everyone, including the president, talked about last September? Where was the stampede to language schools, a critical need? On Sept. 10, 2001, the National Security Administration intercepted the message "tomorrow is zero hour." No one translated it until thousands had perished.

America has to rethink itself, but do we have the leadership to facilitate that process? The president refuses to even consider an alteration in our oil-junkie energy policy. A gutless Congress can't even increase fuel-efficiency standards. The administration idea's of intellectual heavy lifting is trying to figure out how to pay for a war and still allow the rich to keep their tax cut.

Overall, it's not the response to Sept. 11 we hoped for. Without dramatic improvement on every front, we'll continue to be the target of this network of snakes and its psychotic Robin Hoods.