This coming Sunday will be the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is hard to believe that 15 years have come and gone since that terrible morning in September of 2001. I awoke that morning to a world that seemed unmoored from any reference point of understanding, any prior experience in my life. The idea that not one, but two American cities could be dealt such stunning blows defied every expectation I had been raised to have. For most of that morning I felt something that probably no American had felt since the waning days of the Cold War: I felt fear for my immediate personal safety from a force beyond our country’s borders.
I think it is impossible to fully appreciate the impact of that morning on the collective American psyche without considering the historical context in which it happened.
Like most American adults alive on that day, I had grown up under the somewhat rigid and seemingly permanent structures of the Cold War world, in which the Soviet Union and the West were locked in what President John F Kennedy called “the long, twilight struggle.” It is hard at this remove to communicate to younger people what it was like to live in that world.
The Cold War involved the entire world. Almost every country was encouraged to declare itself as either aligned with the West or with the Soviets. The world was seen as “bipolar”. This word had no relation to the mental illness of that name, but instead referred to the two “poles” or centers of power (Washington and Moscow) that dominated the world’s affairs. International affairs were seen as a “zero-sum game” in which any political or military gain by one “pole” was automatically seen as a loss by the other.
I mentioned in a column a few years ago that, while I have no desire to resurrect that world – a world that was one miscalculation away from utter nuclear annihilation – “having the Soviet Union as an enemy against which we could unite was in some respects a good thing for America. We naturally put aside our differences, or at least dialed back their intensity, in the presence of an existential and external menace. Having an enemy that stood ready to foment and exploit revolution made it necessary to take concrete steps to prevent one. Roosevelt’s New Deal was in large measure enacted to prevent revolution, especially in the context of the economic failures that culminated in the Great Depression, failures that had made communism an attractive prospect for a significant fraction of a desperate population.
“But even after the Depression, given the threat posed by a competing ideology, restraining capitalism’s worst features was a continuous exercise. As I’ve mentioned before, capitalism has a structural tendency to self-destruct, since it concentrates wealth in a smaller and smaller slice at the top of the income scale, which leads to everyone else not having enough spending power to keep the economy growing. In the absence of income growth, the economy goes into a lurching boom-and-bust mode: booms fueled by easy credit, following by long, grinding busts when everyone’s credit cards are maxed out.
“Much of progressive economic and social policy of the Cold War era can be understood as an attempt to impose some restraint and stability on an economic system that had previously lacked those features.”
The end of that struggle, when it came, arrived with stunning swiftness. During October of 1989, a succession of revolutions in Eastern Europe fatally undermined the Warsaw Pact alliance, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviets were finished as a global imperial power.
The United States spent the next 12 years throwing a Cold War victory party. It seemed that for America, it was all coming together. With our historic foe vanquished, military bases across the country closed, there was much talk of a “peace dividend,” and for virtually the entire decade of the 1990s the economy boomed as it hadn’t in decades, showering prosperity on virtually every class of Americans. The federal budget went from deficit to surplus (thanks to the tax windfall from the burgeoning economy and cuts in military spending) and there was a real sense that the United States might be entering a golden age.
That party ended on Sept. 11, 2001. The total costs of the attacks, including our sometimes wayward and counterproductive response to it, have amounted to over $3 trillion. Our sense of national invulnerability turned out to be an illusion, as did our self-image as freedom-defending heroes to a grateful world.
There are signs that we may be finally emerging from the darkness of the last 15 years. I heard recently that BART is going to reopen the rest rooms in the underground stations in its system for the first time since the attacks. There is a growing sense that after 15 years of war, Americans may be losing their tolerance for committing ground troops to military projects with no clear path to victory. While I support (with some reservations) the military response to the Islamic State lunatics in the Middle East, I don’t think victory over that organization will ultimately come from military power alone, but from providing the people who support them with a plausible and just alternative, and by rethinking our role in that region of the world.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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