Five years later, we wonder and try to adapt

By: Vic Monaco
   As the calendar creeps up on Sept. 11, 2006, it’s hard not to think back to where you were five years ago, when the Twin Towers fell — and the world as we know it changed.
   It’s hard not to relive those horrifying moments — followed by the hours of uncertainty, the days of chaos, the weeks and months of national mourning and soul-searching.
   It’s hard not to acknowledge that Americans — untouched in two world wars and countless regional conflicts by a direct attack on our soil — were suddenly and rudely awakened to a new war on terror, with no rules and no boundaries, on Sept. 11, 2001.
   It’s hard for residents of central New Jersey not to reflect on the friends, neighbors and family members lost to those wanton terrorist acts — the destruction by two jetliners of the World Trade Center, the attack by a third on the Pentagon, the crash of a fourth in a field in Pennsylvania.
   And it’s hard not to wonder how the United States, so unified and so focused on rooting out those responsible for these acts — Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda operatives and the Taliban regime that harbored them in Afghanistan — managed to wind up five years later mired in an unrelated civil war in Iraq.
   The memories are still too fresh — and the aftereffects too palpable — to gauge the full and lasting impact of Sept. 11, 2001, on this nation and the world. It has already joined Dec. 7, 1941, and Nov. 22, 1963, as dates that are indelibly stamped on America’s collective psyche. But the aftermath of those earlier catastrophic events is now a matter of historical record; we’re still living through the aftermath of our more recent national trauma — and its longer-term implications are far from clear.
   How long will Americans live with color-coded posted probabilities of terrorist threats? A year? A decade? A lifetime? When will we stop standing in interminable lines, removing our shoes, our belts and our pocket change — and stowing our toothpaste in checked luggage — before we can board an airplane? Next year? In 10 years? Never? When, if ever, will Americans feel safe again?
   To what extent are we as a people willing to give up the constitutional protection of our civil liberties to fight the war on terror? Enough to suspend, for suspects charged with acts of terrorism, the presumption of innocence? Enough to deny detainees the right to counsel? Enough to allow government agencies to monitor our computers, our phone calls and our bank accounts?
   Is the war on terror primarily a military conflict that can be won by force of arms? Or is it a test of wills that can only be resolved through diplomacy? Or is it truly jihad — a holy war of incompatible cultures, intolerant religions and competing ideologies — that has no resolution at all?
   We do not know where this war is taking us — and we haven’t an inkling of how, when or where it might end. We know only that Sept. 11, 2001, ushered in an era of gnawing insecurity in a country unfamiliar with self-doubt and unaccustomed to dealing with an unseen enemy. Dating back to the earliest days of the republic, the enemy — the British, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Germans, the Axis, the Warsaw Pact, the North Koreans, the North Vietnamese — had a face. The suicide bomber does not.
   As we look, five years later, to come to grips with Sept. 11, we confront a painful but unavoidable truth. Our lives have changed, our nation has been wounded, our world is a different place. A more lasting legacy will rest on how well we — along with the rest of the world — adapt to this undeniable reality.