EDITORIAL: Things that consumed our lives just 10 days ago don’t seem as important any more.
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.
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America attacked: Two township residents feared dead (Sept. 13, 2001) Terror’s shockwaves felt locally (Sept. 14, 2001) Anger, sadness among range of emotions (Sept. 14, 2001) Area ministry, schools respond to grief-stricken (Sept. 14, 2001) Terrorists ask for war (Sept. 14, 2001) Helping children cope with disaster (Sept. 14, 2001) Terror attacks claim at least six local residents (Sept. 21, 2001) Building a garden to remember (Sept. 21, 2001) Former Hightstown man hero of Flight 93 (Sept. 21, 2001) Township Council to eye memorial (Sept. 21, 2001) Priest’s painting inspires parishoners (Sept. 21, 2001) Area Muslims condemn attacks (Sept. 21, 2001) Tragedy forces new sense of perspective (Sept. 21, 2001) Children want to help, too (Sept. 21, 2001) |
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 George W. 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 more than a 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 Hightstown, the Borough Council and residents argued whether the borough should buy the GPU property on Mercer Street and move the municipal offices there. The Twin Rivers Homeowners Association and the Committee for a Better Twin Rivers were engaged in a back-and-forth debate on these very pages about the rights of tenants and homeowners there.
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.

