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A nation of suspects—that's what we've become
You have to resent being presumed guilty of “something.” Is this fear the freedom that we are talking about exporting to the rest of the world? Or is this one example of the rampant suspicion that we contracted from 9/11?I worked on Capitol Hill when 9/11 occurred and I was ashamed of our public servants, of the members of Congress, for how they reacted. While fire and rescue workers on the East Coast ran to the aid of citizens at the risk of their lives, indeed giving up their lives for persons they did not even know, most members of Congress abandoned their staffs and were not to be found until the all-clear signal was sounded late that evening, and they gathered to give a national pep talk, sang a patriotic ditty and disappeared again into their hiding places.
What Congress did was a quite discouraging profile for a fellow like me who believes in this political business to the very core of his being.
In the days that followed 9/11, it got worse. Members of Congress told the nation it was safe to fly, and they stayed put in Washington or convinced the military to shuttle them back and forth on transports to their districts; some members traveled in private planes.
The members of Congress discussed closing down all the buildings to the public, defying Thomas Jefferson's critique that a government closed to the public is not democratic. Some talked about dropping nuclear weapons on foreign nation-states—although they were not certain just where they should do that.
There was a bill presented in the U.S. Congress, I called it the “Mars Attack” bill (after a ridiculous movie of that name), because it provided for replacing all the members of Congress should they be destroyed in a terrorist attack.
Congress spoke with gusto about our freedoms but rushed to compromise these very freedoms in the wrongly named U.S.A. Patriot Act that betrayed our freedoms when we should have been working to preserve them, and, thus, we created the national paranoia that grips the nation to this day.
On the evening that Congress was considering the Patriot Act, I went for a run from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and found a candlelight vigil by the reflecting pool where citizens of every age sat in a circle of life discussing the terror and bravery they had heard of or experienced in the recent memory of those horrible events. That experience of their love for this nation is seared into my soul, giving me hope that the people know what matters, even if all the politicians do not always get it.
We had a chance to come together after those terrible events on 9/11, to harness the good feeling and the courage of our citizens and to join hands with nations around the world.
But we were already forging the division that divides our house to this day, instead of working toward that more perfect union that our founders sought to establish. It was Abraham Lincoln's words at Cooper Union in New York that catapulted him into national leadership when, invoking the good book, he said that a House divided cannot stand.
Yet, we are more divided than ever as a nation and more disconnected than ever in the world community, more fearful, more insecure and seemingly split almost right down the middle as to where to go from here: either to stick with President Bush or to strike out with a new commander-in-chief, Sen. Kerry.
I cannot help but wonder what kind of person would take advantage of the crisis of 9/11 as a pretext to pursue a war with Iraq. Treasury Secretary O'Neil said that war with Iraq was on the agenda of the president's first cabinet meeting, long before 9/11. We heard the same from Richard Clarke. The president had Iraq war plans presented to him in Crawford, Texas, in August 2001.
This nation is ready to set a new course. I believe it is at peril if it does not set a new course. I do not believe that we should go it alone—because we can. I believe we are all in this together, working toward that more perfect union, and that it does truly matter how we treat our neighbors, at home and abroad.
I recently attended my 40th high school reunion from Fordham Prep, a Jesuit School in the Bronx, and, as I walked past a mural in the gym, it showed Jesuits tending to the young, the sick and the old. These are the Christian values that we give so much lip-service to in this nation’s public policy discussions but that we disregard in our daily practice.
Whether we hold these same values, by belief or philosophy, it is the path, the only path, by which we citizens may form that more perfect union and put an end to this inward-turning, self-centered culture of fear that treats us, each of us, as suspects instead of citizens in our own homeland.
John P. Flannery, a Democrat, practices law in Leesburg, lives in Lovettsville and welcomes courteous comments at john@johnpflannery.com.
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