Before the dangerous controversy over a proposed Koran burning in Florida stole the news, before a summer of politically hyped Islamophobia clouded clear thinking, today’s remembrance of the terrorist acts of 9/11 and the innocent victims who died on that day in 2001 might have been quieter and more reflective.
The events of that day seared both an indelible sense of vulnerability, and a firmer sense of our irrefutable global connectedness, into the American psyche. Even as those murderous acts made us at once more humble and more resilient, sadder but more tightly bonded, they left us groping with the challenge of reconciling our place in the world.
How could our own sense of America’s goodness be seen as the prompter of hatred in an extremist cause abroad in which our cultural and commercial reach touched only tangentially – and often, then, without any conscious awareness among ordinary Americans?
Why would the terrorists of extremism want to do such great harm to our nation and cause the indefensible deaths of so many of our people? How could we best control the inherent conflict made manifest by those awful acts of seemingly random and unmerited hatefulness?
Americans have since come to recognize that our culture and some of our most precious freedoms may be seen among the extremist foes of modernity as the root of a contagion that, in their view, threatens to destabilize the world they yearn to keep uncontaminated by change.