September 11th, 2001: The Last Good Morning in America?

Life in the United States changed forever on September 11th, 2001. Nearly everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center that morning. I myself was already in my morning graduate-level logic class at Syracuse University during my first year of graduate school when I heard the news, although the full extent of 9/11 would become clear only later in the day. It was only after class, for example, during a trip to a nearby bookstore, that I heard that the Twin Towers had actually collapsed. What began as a beautiful September morning, both in New York City and where I was in upstate New York, turned out to be the most significant turning point of United States history and culture during my lifetime.

Prior to 9/11, even given the news media’s penchant for metaphorical ambulance chasing, there were actually good news days with no major crisis or noteworthy negative story to report on—just day-to-day life in America, and a generally good life at that, especially in the post-Cold-War, internet-fueled optimism of the 1990s, an optimism that even the dot-com bust was in no danger of breaking.

The morning of September 11th, 2001 began like any other. It was just another beautiful morning in New York City—and, indeed, across America—as recounted by the various news agencies reporting that morning, along with the optimistic, jovial tone of the beginning of that morning’s Good Morning America broadcast with Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer. I would even go so far as to say that 9/11/2001 was the last good morning in America. Every morning thereafter has been filled with news of terrorism, war, racism, recession, cultural and political upheaval, hatred, insurrection, and divisive rhetoric on a scale never before seen in the United States.

It seems to me that 9/11 was one bookend of a progressive, optimistic cultural arc that began in the post-World-War-II era, through the growth and prosperity of the Eisenhower era of the 1950s, through the counterculture optimism of the 1960s and 1970s (even despite the racial tensions of the 1960s), through the economic boom of the 1980s and Ronald Reagan’s America as a shining city on a hill, culminating in the fall of the Soviet Union, and through the techno-utopianism of the 1990s as the United States and the world entered the internet age by collectively surfing the internet and navigating the information superhighway—the digital equivalent of the construction of the Interstate highway system of 40 years prior. (For an excellent treatment of the link between the optimism of 1960s counterculture and the optimism of the internet age of the 1990s, see From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner.)

With all of that collective optimism, it was unthinkable to most of us who grew up in any of those decades that something like September 11th could alter our collective consciousness so drastically. It was unimaginable to us that Americans could be anything but optimistic and progressive—even at our most conservative and regressive—when it comes to our outlook on our future and our collective identity as Americans. Yet, September 11th, 2001 was indeed a turning point and a bookend to this radical optimism that had so defined American life for over 50 years—and perhaps for its entire existence up to that moment in history.

Henry David Thoreau, in his best-known book, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, once said the following about newspapers:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter,—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? (Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the woods, Where I Lived and What I Lived For)

Sadly, Thoreau’s sentiment about the news seems to have been true since the morning of September 11th, 2001. We have been acquainted for 20 years now with the general principle that there are no more good mornings in America, that every news day will be a bad news day, whether it’s the latest resurgence of racial tensions in America or news of a Trump-fueled insurrection at the United States Capitol, whether it’s impeachment news or the daily count of COVID cases and deaths. Even on days when there are substantive and positive human interest stories, such good news is instantly overshadowed by the seemingly endless barrage of bad news fueling the breakdown of our collective sense of stability and our shared identity as Americans.

I seldom watch the news anymore, perhaps because of Thoreau’s admonition that there is really nothing new to be discovered in the news. I don’t know what it will take to re-inject the lost optimism and cohesiveness of American culture back into our day-to-day lives. I, for one, am still optimistic about the techno-utopian promises of the internet to create a global, cosmopolitan community for the free exchange of ideas that even Diogenes the Cynic, the first person to use the phrase “cosmopolitan” in describing himself as a “citizen of the world,” could never have imagined. And although the Republican Party has taken a disturbing turn toward right-wing extremism in recent years, and although I now consider myself to be more of a progressive and a liberal than a conservative in any contemporary sense, I share in former president Ronald Reagan’s rejection of the popular Malthusian perspective on the future of America—even by supposedly progressive/liberal thinkers, who should be optimists if anyone should be!—as being in a state of perpetual decline:

We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline. I do not believe in a fate that will all on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew—our faith and our hope. (Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address)

If you, like I am, are nostalgic for the lost optimism of the latter half of the 20th century, still clinging to the lost metanarratives of peace, progress, and American unity, it’s up to you to do your part to bring back the lost optimism! Let’s renew our commitment to both scientific and social progress. Let’s renew our commitment to justice and equality, and to social progress where that progress has stagnated or even, sadly, reverted. Let’s renew our commitment to social order and the rule of law in our democratic republic—not a pure democracy, it is to be noted, because of our founding father’s fear of pure democracy as tyranny of the masses, which has also been seen in recent years. Let’s renew our commitment to civility, friendship, and freedom of expression, even when faced with those with whom we disagree the most, renewing our shared identity as Americans and as fellow citizens in the process. And let’s do our part to make some good news for the global news conglomerates to report on once again.

Those of us in education, we teachers and professors, tend to be optimists by definition insofar as we believe in the power of education to create the free society with the values that have historically distinguished us as Americans. Even as we’ve seen the erosion of those values culturally and politically, we educators generally still believe that we are fighting the good fight to reverse the course of the past two decades, attempting, futilely or not, to instill the values that we hold most precious, educational values or otherwise, into our students—one class, one semester, one lecture, discussion, and assignment at a time.

But we educators can’t be the only cultural warriors fighting to resurrect and preserve our progressive American values, to keep us firmly within the age of Enlightenment without letting us slip into a new cultural and educational dark age from which it may take decades, centuries, or, heaven forbid, millennia to recover. So, yes, let’s teach history, philosophy, literature, and cultural anthropology. Let’s teach calculus and physics. Let’s teach civics and political science. Let’s teach sociology, psychology, and economics. But let’s teach our students what it took for us as a species and as a nation to become who we are and have been, and what it takes to sustain this decadently modern and comfortable world to which we have become so accustomed but which, contrary to Reagan’s and my own optimism, is actually in danger of falling apart around us unless we teach our children and each new generation not just the knowledge but the cultural and political values, that it takes to sustain it.

We can’t let the aberration of the last 20 years of declining American culture become the norm. Those of us who lived through the optimistic decades of the 20th century must do our very best to instill and foster that same optimism in the next generation—just as the optimistic vision of the future depicted in Star Trek: The Original Series reached its philosophical zenith in the relentlessly optimistic depiction of the future seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its emphasis on the perfectibility of society and of human nature, and our ability to overcome the forces that would dismantle society like those seen around us, and in the news daily for the past 20 years. Let us likewise aim to reach a new hight of optimism in the age that follows this 20-year-long post-9/11 era!

If we no longer really believe in the American future, then perhaps we should simply do nothing and let the civility of American life decline around us. But that’s not the future Ronald Reagan saw, and that’s not the future any educator worth his or her salt toils away for, day in and day out in classrooms all over America. We believe that we can genuinely teach children to value education for its own sake, that they can use their knowledge—and hopefully wisdom—to build an even better America than the one that you and I grew up with in the 20th century, that they can work out their differences peacefully and with mutual respect—even with those with whom they vehemently disagree—and that they can glimpse a better future for themselves that what they see and have seen in the news for the past 20 years and, even worse, in the harmful and divisive rhetoric of the Trump era—whether from local or national politicians, from their so-called pastors who should know better, and even in their own homes as the harmful rhetoric of recent years permeates seemingly into every part of contemporary life in America.

It’s time to grow up once again, America, all of us, collectively, or perhaps to return to the optimism of our youth, and to realize that we have dropped the cultural ball over the past 20 years. So let’s wake up on the morning of September 11th, 2021—20 years after the newsworthy events of September 11th, 2001—with a renewed sense of optimism and with newfound resolve to rededicate ourselves to the progressiveness of the 20th century, a progressiveness that wasn’t confined to the distinction between liberals and conservatives.

As president Ronald Reagan also once said, “And, after all, why shouldn't we believe that? We are Americans.”