I got up to teach the morning the Twin Towers fell. The buildings were burning when I had to walk to work stunned. Who did it? How many were dead? Were we at war?
As I got to my office, two college students sat at a fountain and I heard them speaking: “Twin Towers. Twin Towers. That’s all that is on television. Now that’s all we are going to hear all week.”
These students were bored with 9/11 on 9/11.
I have not been able to stop thinking about this reaction, because if anything, this reaction has gotten worse. The problems that lead to 9/11 reach back far past my grandparents’ lifetime and will not be solved in the lifetime of my children.
Some students went on to serve in the War on Terror, one heroically. The bored kids were not an entire generation, but they were an outer sign of a growing reality: we lack the attention span needed in a Republic.
Solving scientific problems takes time. Getting a good education is hard and takes effort over years. There is no way to learn about tariff policy and be entertained. We are each just a piece of solving any long term problem, because one lifetime is hardly ever enough. Abolition of slavery took lifetimes and many of the heroes that called for votes for women did not live to vote. For a Republic to solve problems well takes patience and patience must be cultivated.
The enemy of any democratic republic is passion that seizes on easy or quick solutions. Are we cultivating that patience in ourselves? We don’t need demons to account for our impatience, our improvidence, our imprudence, though demons don’t help. A weakness of liberty, of free markets, is that they are designed to give us what we want and left to ourselves, what we want may not be good for us.
The grocery store charges extra to cut your vegetables for you and I heard someone complain that breakfast cereal was hard to make. Drag a scandal out long enough and commentators will say: “Boring. Move on.”
Sadly, we cannot just get better now . . . the problem of impatience requires patience to solve! What to do?
Impatience breeds cynicism as promises of quick cures and easy solutions disappoint us. Let’s use our cynicism on any promise of easy or instant answers. The harder and bigger the problem, the tougher the solution will be. We cannot balance the American budget painlessly with “cutting waste and abuse” or “raising taxes on the rich.”
We must also practice memory and 9/11 is a good place to start. My college students don’t remember the tragedy. 9/11 was fifteen years ago and fifteen years is yesterday historically, so for those students, time has come to review the footage. All of us oldsters must recognize nobody is old enough to remember all we need to know. Understanding what happened requires some reading about World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
If we don’t have time to do this work, then we should trust experts who have taken the time. To save the Republic, we must flee demagogues and those who give us easy answers. Being bored of 9/11 will not prevent another one . . . ask Western Europe.
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