Opelika Observer Staff Editorial - 9/2: "10 years after 9/11 - how have we changed?"

This week, each of us took time to reflect on the impact and legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against this country, asking ourselves where we were as a nation and where we are now, 10 years after that horrible tragedy.

We all remember being shocked by the events – as all Americans no doubt were.

We initially wrapped ourselves in patriotism and the love of our country, security blankets in a time when security was no longer certain.

Phrases like “We will hunt down the people who did this to us,” “We will make them pay,” and “We will have vengeance,” were commonplace in the mouths of politicians, journalists and citizens alike.

Wars were started, men and women in uniform were deployed to defend America’s freedoms as they always have.

Laws were passed, giving law enforcement agencies extraordinary powers to conduct their investigations, powers that had previously been deemed a vast invasion of personal privacy.

Security trumped liberty. It almost seemed like it had to at the time.

Franklin Roosevelt told this country after the attacks on Pearl Harbor that “The only thing we had to fear was fear itself.”

After the 9/11 attacks, it seemed we were supposed to be afraid.

Fear was color-coded for us, made a part of our daily lives in the form of the Department of Homeland Security’s daily “Terror Alert” statuses.

We were at war with “terror,” but how do we declare war on an abstract noun and expect to win?

What is terror, but a “state of intense fear”?

We fought fear with more fear, and yet somehow expected to win.

Now, we find ourselves with a nation whose coffers are virtually empty and whose military might is stretched thin.

We can no longer afford nor tolerate to be the world’s policemen, though our expected place in the world would seem to signify we must.

The wars undertaken in the name of “securing freedom” continue onward, even though the goalposts have changed. “Routing out terror wherever it lives” became “liberation of oppressed people” and “nation-building.”

We must remember those wise words of one of our most famous founding fathers, Dr. Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Patriotism and pride are wonderful things, but they can be used to conceal sometimes dubious intents taken by our government.

To truly help our country, we must continue to fight terror here at home, by fighting those who would use fear and the tactics of fear to scare us into giving up our essential American freedoms.

We must give up the anger, cynicism and divisiveness that continues to eat at the core of this country, replacing it with the pride, unity and kindness we saw in our fellow Americans following 9/11.

We must be the America we’re supposed to be, that “shining city on a hill” Ronald Reagan evoked.

We’re not that America now, and we haven’t been since the first few months after 9/11.

We worry that it may soon be too late to ever be that America again.