Divisions then and now

One of the enduring myths of America is that we were united after 9/11 until Iraq.  No, we weren’t.  I had tickets to the Ohio State football game scheduled for September 15, 2001.  Like all major events, it was postponed and picked up during the team’s bye week in late October.  On the way to the game I always listen to the local AM station pregame show.  That week was no different.

At the top of each hour, the station gives a general news cast.  Even then, the news was still dominated by coverage of 9/11.  Yet during the news that morning, there was a story in which Democrats were blasting Rush Limbaugh for attacking critics of Bush.  Sound familiar?  Already the partisan bickering was taking off, mere weeks after the attacks.  It wasn’t Iraq, it wasn’t even Afghanistan.  The public hadn’t even considered the US invading Afghanistan yet.  In fact, in November that year I remember Democrats coming down on Bush for not doing something after so many weeks following the attacks.

Of course once we invaded Afghanistan, critics pounced.  There were demonstrations and peace protests.  Critics here and abroad condemned Bush’s decision, citing a lack of evidence that Al-Qaeda or Bin Laden had anything to do with the attacks.  And all well before the idea of invading Iraq was even in the front of the news.

The point is, we might have been unified for a few days after 9/11, as this article says, but it didn’t take long.  Because we were already divided on the morning of September 11.  And we had been for some time.  Heck, America has always been divided about something.  From the beginning, we’ve had debate and disagreement.  Even in the vaunted war years of WWII, there was division.   You had conscientious objectors.  Jeannette Rankin famously voted against war with Japan.  Filmmakers and military advocates pressed for more openness with the public about the horrors of war.  By 1944, public pressure was mounting for Washington to wrap things up and end the conflict.

America is a free country.  And in a free country, people express their opinions.  And this might come as a shock, but we don’t always agree.  It shouldn’t mean more than the fact we don’t always agree.  Unfortunately, it has come to mean that and more.  Hence the bitterness of the current presidential campaign.  There are no doubt reasons for this degenerating discourse. Not because for the first time in history America is divided.  But for other reasons, the divisions point to deeper issues.  Reasons that get to the heart of who we are and what we’ve become.

In the days following 9/11, almost everyone was saying the same thing:  We cannot let this change us.   We cannot let the terrorists win by changing who we are.  Max Lucado, a popular Christian author, penned an editorial that alone bucked the trend.  He said simply that he hoped 9/11 would change us.  Clearly by then, America had serious problems.  Problems that were manifest in more than just how we disagreed and our growing refusal to come together over the most basic needs of our nation.

I think Max was onto something.