Tim Rogers: The legacy of 9/11

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September 11, 2011

Anonymous timrogers@daltoncitizen.com The Dalton Daily Citizen Sun Sep 11, 2011, 02:33 AM EDT

The legacy of 9/11

Good morning.

History will rightly remember the 20th century as the American Century.

And it should.

It started in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, which left the United States with an overseas empire and served as our coming out party to the rest of the world.

It continued with our victories in World War I, World War II and the Cold War.

It saw our citizens benefit from the greatest leap in the standard of living that any civilization has ever experienced and made us the envy of the world.

We were the unquestioned dominant world superpower and no one, not even the Soviet Union, could muster the wherewithal to challenge us.

All of that, however, is now part of our past.

That century ended on Sept. 11, 2001, when, for the first time, our enemies brought the fight to our shore.

For more than two centuries we had lived with the security that the vast breadth of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans afforded us.

We became the arsenal of democracy because our home front stayed safe and secure. But on that fateful sunny September morning our safety and security was shattered.

We have spent the last decade trying to put those pieces back together, but, as we have found out, that is nearly impossible to do.

As we have all said many times, the destruction of the twin towers really did change us forever.

The question that we are still struggling with is how.

How did we change? How is the United States different today than we were just 10 short years ago? Is it possible that the 21st century won’t be the American Century II, that it will belong to someone else?

What is easy to tick off is all of the obvious changes that have happened around us.

Increased security for air travel, check. Increased fear about what the future holds for us, check. Decreased financial security, check. Challenges to our global hegemony, check, check and double check.

I think the hardest thing for us to come to grips with, however, is that perhaps we haven’t changed as much as we think.

Perhaps what really changed is the world around us and until 9/11 we could remain blissfully unaware that this was going on.

Until 9/11 we never really thought of how disliked we might be in many countries around the world. We never thought that we were seen by many as bad guys, not good guys.

Before 9/11, we wouldn’t have thought that our economy would be competing with Brazil and India and other emerging countries. It certainly would never have occurred to us that our drivers would be competing for the same tank of gas as the drivers in those countries.

Before 9/11, terrorist attacks were something we saw on TV coming to us from halfway around the world.

In many ways, 9/11 brought us closer to the rest of the world and the world closer to us.

Perhaps our biggest challenge is to try and rebuild what we lost but to figure out how we can thrive in this new environment.

Maybe this won’t be our century the way the 20th century was, but it still can be a very good next 100 years for the United States.

We still have plenty of resources. We still have the smartest, best educated, most innovative population in the world.

We are still, in fact, the envy of both our friends and our enemies.

What is missing is that fear that went with that envy.

The world, as it is wont to do, caught up with us when we were busy with many other things.

9/11 was the alarm going off that woke us up to this truth.

Our challenge is to continue to prosper as a country in the face of all these new realities.

How well we do that will be the real legacy of the horror we all experienced 10 years ago.

Tim Rogers is editor of The Daily Citizen. He can be reached at timrogers@daltoncitizen.com.

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