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In one year, we painfully learn lessons for a lifetime
© St. Petersburg Times This is the end of 2001. It is never a good idea to be ungrateful for a year -- honestly, would you rather not have been around for it? -- but still, this one did not exactly have a carefree ring. Even by normal yardsticks, 2001 had the feel of bills coming due. We started the year still in a funk over the just-settled election. No matter who you supported, George Bush or Al Gore, you have to admit there had never been anything like it in our lifetimes. We settled it as best we could, according to our laws and our courts. Bush took the oath of office in January, and for most Americans that settled it. Still, the whole experience shook up our view of our institutions. Meanwhile, we ended the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth since World War II. People in tune with it said you could feel the thing drop right off a cliff. The so-called federal surplus disappeared with a pfffft! Had the Fed knocked down interest rates any lower, lenders would be paying borrowers. Wait, the carmakers already started doing that. If the first shoe of the economy to drop belonged to the dot-coms the year before, then the second shoe belonged to dot-us in 2001. Unemployment crept upward. The stock market amazed millions of investors to whom, apparently, it had never occurred that the thing could go down too. Still wish you had put all your Social Security dough in the market? The only thing that had kept us afloat for so long was not business investment, or sound fundamentals, but rather that consumers had continued to spend cash like drunks on Bourbon Street. Low personal savings? High credit debt? No problem. Be a patriot and buy a new TV. Here in Florida, our governor and Legislature had to slash the state budget by $1-billion plus, hurting education, social services and criminal justice, after several years of not having to make really tough choices. This came on top of a bunch of new findings about how lousy Florida ranks in several categories. Good thing this was the year that we got rid of our central state university system, too. All of these "normal" problems became instantly unimportant by comparison on the morning of Sept. 11. Not in our lifetime, not in the lifetime of any American ever, had an outside power landed such a devastating attack on our soil. The twin towers of New York and the headquarters of our nation's military in Washington were struck by American aircraft hijacked by terrorists for suicide runs. We had been warned, plenty, just like we are warned about a lot of bad things that we choose to ignore. We had been warned with reports. We had been warned by experts. We had been warned by testimony to Congress. The only sense in which we were not warned was that neither the CIA nor the FBI knew the exact day and hour. Over the years, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had drawn our attention ever inward, focused on ourselves, and our comfort, and our culture, and not on the world at large. Immense tragedies played out in Somalia and Rwanda and Bosnia to only our mild attention. Even attacks on U.S. embassies and warships during the 1990s barely pierced our domestic fog. Sept. 11 pierced it, all right. We united in shock and grief and rage. Most Americans quickly agreed on the president's response, to attack the regime that had harbored our attackers, and the attackers themselves. A minority of Americans used their freedom to disagree. We debated civil liberties, and the rights of immigrants and noncitizens. A few tried to use the politics of saying, "If you do not agree with me, then you are helping the terrorists." But the vast majority of Americans did not buy that sort of thing from anybody who tried to sell it. So now we are saying goodbye to a year that taught us (1) not to take our political institutions for granted, (2) not to take our economic well-being for granted, and (3) not to take our nation's physical safety for granted. How many years teach us so much? -- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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Times columns today Howard Troxler From the Times Metro desk |
