The meaning of 9/11? That great evil lurks in the heart of man

National Post, 11 September 2021

Looking down into the abyss, New York's 9/11 memorial invites us to glimpse into the darkness.

There are so many worlds within worlds in Manhattan that, after 20 years of going to New York frequently, it was only this summer that I finally visited the 9/11 memorial. Usually my work is in midtown, and so I don’t get down to the financial district.

I remembered this summer that the last time I saw the Twin Towers was in September 2001, just a few days before 9/11. I was playing tourist on the Staten Island ferry, a great (and inexpensive) way to see lower Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty and the bridges to Brooklyn.

By the day of the attacks, I was back in Rome. I remember watching the towers collapse just a few hours before walking over to St. Peter’s Basilica to pray. The thought occurred spontaneously: Would someone crash a plane into Michelangelo’s cupola next?

I remember watching the towers collapse

What’s the meaning of 9/11 twenty years afterward?

The most practical consequence is that it is no longer possible to stroll into St. Peter’s Basilica, or any number of otherwise public buildings. There are long lines as pilgrims go through security checks. Freedom is part of what the terrorists took that day, and like the thousands of lives cruelly massacred, that, too, is not coming back.

In the early 1990s I had a summer job in Ottawa and it was possible for an ordinary citizen to walk in the front door of the Parliament buildings and, after a perfunctory check-in with security, go to your MP’s office — or wherever else you wanted to go. No metal detectors, no escort required. I once spent an afternoon in the magnificent Library of Parliament just by walking in and asking to sit down. The only place that was (loosely) guarded was the corridor to the prime minister’s office.

All that is gone. When the current Parliamentary renovations are complete in about a decade, give or take a few years, visitors will be received in a massive fortified underground bunker. It will be more like visiting a military installation than the house of the people’s business.

So 9/11 took away our public access, even as for decades the Northern Ireland “Troubles” meant that London railway stations had neither rubbish bins nor storage lockers. The IRA might be planting a bomb, so everyone else had to carry their garbage home.

But what did 9/11 mean, aside from the practical ratcheting up of the security state? What great principles were being defended, what great cause was at stake?

That was difficult to determine, aside from rejecting the hatred on the side of the attackers. It was evident in the nomenclature of what followed, the “War on Terror.” Terror is a tactic, not a cause. It is right to punish those who wreak violence upon others, and it is right to eliminate dangers to our safety. But that is not an inspiring ideal.

There was no great cause in the “War on Terror”; it was a necessary defensive reaction. Perhaps for that reason the mission in Afghanistan shifted toward other causes, more noble. Quasi-liberal quasi-democracy. Education for children. Equality of the sexes. People want to fight for something, not just secure the perimeter.

All that is clear at New York’s 9/11 memorial. It is impressive and moving. It borrows the engraving of names and the sleek, black rock from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Yet at the heart of it is a great, vast emptiness, water falling into the abyss. There is a serenity, to be sure, and it is conducive to reflection. But reflection upon what?

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