PACKET EDITORIAL, Sept. 18
By: Packet Editorial
In the aftermath of last Tuesday’s devastating attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon indeed, on America itself a sense of unity, solidarity and common purpose has swept across this country that is perhaps unparalleled since the Second World War.
Many events have gripped and galvanized Americans in the last half-century the Korean conflict, the Kennedy assassination, the Iran hostage crisis, the Challenger explosion, the Gulf War, the bombings in Beirut, Oklahoma City and Atlanta, the Columbine massacre and many more but none has so captured both the grief of an entire nation and the single-minded resolve to take action against those responsible for it.
Even if the enemy in this instance is much harder to identify, and a means of striking back more difficult to fashion, we are drawn together by our common revulsion against terrorism and our overwhelming desire to see retribution taken against the terrorists who carried out this horrific act. President Bush is quite right to keep emphasizing America’s shared and unwavering sense of purpose as he marshals both the domestic and international forces necessary to combat the scourge that has now visited our own shores to such catastrophic effect.
For the past week, many have tried to look for lessons to be learned from this awful experience, focusing for the most part on matters related to our nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, military preparedness, airport security and the like. The emphasis on how we might prevent such an occurrence from ever happening again is understandable, but it serves to obscure a very valuable lesson we could all be learning right now: the lesson of perspective.
Think for a moment about what absorbed us before this attack took place, before we had a common enemy on whom we could focus our wrath, before we witnessed devastation and loss of life beyond our comprehension:
* All across America, we were obsessed with an obscure California congressman’s apparent affair with an intern.
* Meanwhile, our moral outrage climbed, and our talk shows overflowed with vitriol, when we learned that a 12-year-old Little League pitcher was actually 14.
* In Washington, Democrats and Republicans blamed each other in ever-harsher words for raiding the Social Security "lockbox."
* In the New Jersey gubernatorial race, the battle of nasty sound bites heated up between the backers of Jim McGreevey and Bret Schundler.
* In Princeton Borough, the issue that ignited high flames of passion was a downtown parking garage. In Princeton Township and Montgomery, it was how to manage the local deer population. In West Windsor and Plainsboro, it was whether kids should go to the same school from kindergarten through third grade or fifth grade.
Not to trivialize any of these matters, but now might be a good time to put them in some perspective. The intensity of the emotions they stirred up, the level of anger and resentment that accompanied them and the shrillness of the debate they inspired seem so inappropriate to their relative consequence in the wake of last Tuesday’s events.
If we learn nothing else from this national nightmare, perhaps we’ll be better able in the future to separate what’s really important from what isn’t and, in so doing, to save our most heated emotions for those issues, events and circumstances in life that truly matter. With the benefit of perspective, we should already know that America will be a better place if we resolve to reserve our uncivil discourse for uncivilized acts.