Unlearning the Lessons of 9/11

In our frenzied, and generally unsuccessful, search for any historical precedent to this pandemic to help guide our national response, much of the public discourse has tended to center around 9/11. The attack was the last time a crisis so thoroughly shook and dominated our national psyche, and we have thus been subject to a search for possible lessons based on our response to 9/11.

There are parallels to be drawn, and there is indeed some merit in asking for the same united front and collective patriotism we managed after 9/11 instead of our current, far more polarized, response. But the hunt for lessons and parallels has obscured a much darker truth: September 11, and the still ongoing US response to September 11, has completely ill-equipped us to deal with and understand COVID-19.

This is true in explicit and obvious ways. For example, the US has spent at least $2.8 trillion dollars on counterterrorism since 9/11, which means the federal government, and indirectly taxpayers, depleted valuable resources on an exaggerated threat, at the potential expense of adequately funding a crumbling health-care infrastructure, providing a more generous welfare system that could have allowed workers choices beyond risking poverty or their health, or perhaps simply not forcing the CDC to “fall off a funding cliff”. The opportunity cost of spending unimaginable amounts of money on self-destructive forever wars and Orwellian domestic policies unavoidably led to a dearth of money to spend on infrastructure or policies that could have helped alleviate the current crisis.

But 9/11, or more accurately our response to it, has also stymied our reaction to COVID-19 in more subtle, but just as damaging ways. Post 9/11, there was a strong top-down effort to convince Americans not to change their way of life. If we stopped attending baseball games, eating out at restaurants, going to the movies, it would be akin to admitting defeat and any interruption in our everyday life was a surrender to the terrorists. It’s why SNL’s return, or Bush throwing out a first pitch, was met with such patriotic fervor. It helped indicate that the US hadn’t been cowered into submission, and that we still had our freedom.

Following 9/11, this reaction made sense, and was in fact admirable. Americans should not have allowed one awful attack to fundamentally change our way of life. Indeed, parotting statistics about how unlikely one was to actually die from a terrorist attack (as compared to, for example, a car accident) was helpful in preventing mass hysteria in the attack’s aftermath. Unfortunately, that same mentality runs completely counter to the one needed to deal with the current crisis. Staying inside, and deliberately curtailing one’s own freedoms, now is not tantamount to letting the “enemy win”. In fact, in this case, staying inside is the only way to defeat the enemy. Comparing Coronavirus mortality rates to car accidents in an effort to calm people down is now fundamentally irresponsible and potentially dangerous — unlike with terrorism, the more relaxed people are regarding what they do and do not allow themselves to do will have a direct correlation with the final death toll.

Still, some claim that their current haphazard approach to social distancing, or even spring break parties, is an act of heroism, a refusal to cower to yet another American enemy. This misses the point entirely; indeed, they are quite literally empowering the enemy by going out. So when paper-tiger intellectuals like Candace Owens tweet: “WWII generation: We will die before we give up our freedom. This generation: we will give up every single one of freedoms, before we risk dying. Cowardice dressed up as nobility,” they seem utterly confused about what the crisis is, and who the current enemy is. People are not being asked to give up freedoms so that they don’t risk dying; they are being asked to temporarily give up certain freedoms in order to prevent the deaths of others. It should be obvious which one of these courses of actions is more “noble”.

Similarly, our response to 9/11 inspired a lot of talk of American exceptionalism: we were, it was said, the only country capable of defeating these evil regimes and terrorist organizations, and save the free world. One can feel any number of ways about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, amongst others, and still admit that there is obviously a certain American exceptionalism as it pertains to our military and its capabilities. The US has far and away the largest and most powerful military, and an ability to defeat “enemies” that surpasses any other country’s. For better or for worse, it made sense that it was US leadership and US policy that ultimately set the international framework for counterterrorism, and guided other countries’ responses.

This is again an entirely disastrous mentality for the current predicament. As it concerns health care systems, there is absolutely no American Exceptionalism, unless one counts being the only developed nation that regularly bankrupts its sick citizens as exceptional. There is nothing unique about America that will help us during this pandemic, and it is dangerous to pretend otherwise. Our military cannot save us. Our stock market cannot save us. In fact, it is entirely possible that of all the countries currently being hit hardest, the US is least equipped to deal with this pandemic. Thus, instead of forging our own path (ie conservatives advocating for the loosening up of restrictions to save the economy) we should be humble and mirror the actions of other countries and their responses, such as South Korea.

There are other dangerous habits borne out of our reaction to 9/11. This includes a fervor to find a current foreign enemy (fanned by Trump’s and his sycophants’ determination to call this the “Chinese virus”) where there is none. It includes, too, a conscious or subconscious distrust of a media that repeatedly exaggerated the terrorist threat when, today, the media have been a necessary corrective to the efforts by some to downplay the menace.

So while we continue our desperate search for any historical parallels to this crisis, and any lessons to be gleaned from them, let us add one more to the list. That once this crisis is over, we do not let it dominate, guide, and dictate our national consciousness and policy for the next decade until the next crisis inevitably hits, and we are once again left blind-sided and ill-equipped to deal with it.