Yes, America Has Changed

We will forget. Researchers have long known that the memory of epochal events fades with time. Experts have a name for this phenomenon: flashbulb memory. As time passes, the chronology gets jumbled; we fumble on the details; we reimagine the past to make it more coherent, meaningful, bearable. A new study at the University of Illinois at Chicago of a large, countrywide sample of people is discovering that we have already forgotten some things about Sept. 11. Which tower fell first? Was the Pentagon hit after both World Trade Center towers? We forget. We conflate. We confuse.

But we know, of course, that this kind of memory is not the most important one. Some events solder themselves within our consciousness so intensely that they change forever the way we see the world. The details barely matter. The change itself matters. Your child is killed in a car accident; your mother is diagnosed with breast cancer; your wife is raped. These kinds of events stop your life for a moment; your soul freezes while the rest of the world swivels around you to a new position. Part of you insists, This hasn't happened. Part of you demands, Move on. Most of you knows that neither is an option.

And most of us know that there is no moving on from Sept. 11. It wasn't a random tragedy for which grief is a slow-acting salve. It was a massacre--a premeditated murder of civilians by men possessed by a theocratic ideology. It was an invasion--the violation of sovereign American soil, the erasure of a visible monument to American success and energy and civilization. It was a crime--the filling of the air of a great and free city with the irradiated dust of innocent human lives. It was a statement--that radical Islam intends to attack and destroy the very principles of the Enlightenment that underpin the American experiment--freedom of religion, of conscience, toleration and secularism. The appropriate response to this attack is therefore not grief or remembrance or sadness or reflection, although each of these has its place. The appropriate response is rage.

For whatever else Sept. 11 was, it was a declaration of war. The totalitarian force of radical fundamentalist Islam, like the forces of Nazism and communism that preceded it, has not disappeared. We briefly defanged it in its most important lair in Afghanistan, but even there it has not been extinguished. Saudi Arabia, the chief exporter of this murderous ideology, remains protected by the West. Saddam Hussein is currently laboring to manufacture weapons of mass destruction that his allies in the Islamist terrorist network would dearly love to use on American soil. Suicide bombers have not relented in attempting to destroy the democratic state of Israel. Anti-Semitism, now as in the past the kernel of the totalitarian mind, has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Middle East and back into its ancient home in Europe. Educated men and women who regularly find the slightest fault in democratic Western societies vie with one another to provide glib, desperate rationalizations for the murderers of 9/11: arrogant American global power somehow deserved payback, and those who deliberately kill civilians are allegedly legitimate combatants with worthy grievances.