9/11/01-9/11/11: A Nation Recovers by Eugene Mahon, published inh Southampton Press on Thursday September 8, 2011.
On September 11, 2001, not long after the planes crashed into the twin towers, twoLong Islandfour year olds immersed in their nursery school activities were overheard having the following remarkable conversation:
Ryan: “ Eve, did you hear that a plane crashed into one of the towers?”
Eve: “No, Ryan. Two planes crashed into two towers. Bad people did it. But our president is going to take care of it. And if he doesn’t, I will.”
This uncanny exchange, the confidence of Eve in herself and in her president, Ryan’s slight error of reportage, became seared in my memory as a kind of antidote to the awful sickness of heart I felt for weeks and months after the horror of what our country had just experienced. Initially I remember feeling paralyzed, passive, depressed, intimidated by the cunning execution of the well thought out, premeditated terrorist attack. I forced myself to fight off this sense of intimidation by imagining myself lashing out at the terrorists, belt and belt buckle turned into a primitive weapon to whip them with. As one sample of the citizenry at large I doubt that my reaction was that different from others who were initially stunned and then needed to snap themselves out of a sense of passivity and intimidation and retrieve the will to fight back. The quiet courage of Ryan and Eve sustained me also and I wonder on this tenth anniversary of the tragedy we all endured, if a child’s reaction can in any way be compared to the reaction of a whole nation. It is a leap, of course, of preposterous magnitude but I will risk it to make a point. “All serious daring starts from within” Eudora Welty said, and I believe she meant that real courage doesn’t have to make an exhibition of itself, whether we speak of child or nation. There was nothing boastful about Eve’s statement. It was simply an expression of confidence in herself and in her President. At its core it reflected inner strength of character, facilitated of course, by four years of parental love and guidance. Eudora Welty suggests that serious daring is a well thought out inner state of mind. There is nothing reckless about it. Welty’s choice of the word serious suggests that she believes there is a non-serious, reckless kind of daring that should not be confused with true courage and character at all.
I would like to expand the analogy between child and nation by invoking the work of Anna Freud during the Blitz inLondon, a war of terror that preceded this current one. In the midst of WWII during the Blitz, Anna Freud made an astute observation about children’s reactions in wartime. Children whose parents were calm, rational and mature did not seem to be afraid of the bombs falling on their city. We know that fearful, overprotective parents can transmit anxiety to their wards. The corollary is equally true: confident parents transmit a sense of security to their children even in times of war. I believe Winston Churchill’s leadership provided the same kind of calm, rational maturity of vision for the citizens ofEnglandat the time. The average citizen could internalize the confidence and courage of this eloquent leader, who, when a terrorist called Hitler boasted that he would wring the neck ofEnglandlike a chicken’s neck, shot back “Some chicken. Some neck.” His leadership boosted the morale of the people, and the people as parents boosted the morale of their children, as Anna Freud observed. And surely Churchill’s own morale was boosted by the quiet courage of a confederacy of loyal citizens all around him. This emotional reciprocity between nation and citizens, parent and child is surely what JFK was invoking when he said in his inauguration speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask rather what you can do for your country.” This serious daring within child, within parent, within the nation and its leadership, was exemplified in that other war of terror inBritainby the behavior of the King and the royal family: They didn’t remove themselves to some country estate during the Blitz. They stayed inLondonwith the people, surveyed the rubble with the ordinary citizen, the gulf between royalty and commoner dissolved in the melting pot of war.
An anniversary is an opportunity to reassess what we have been through as a nation, the better to realign ourselves with the future. On this anniversary, let us come together, as child, parent, nation, leadership; let us weep together for all our fallen loved ones in this war of terror, and then let us proceed with the crucial task of distinguishing the reckless from the serious as we dare to engage with what lies ahead. Let us hope that ten years of serious reflection on terror has led us toward the kind of serious individual and collective daring that will help us to defeat it. And like Eve, let us dare to expect great things from our nation and from ourselves.
Eugene J Mahon MD
6 East 96th Street
New York,NY,10128
Tel. 212 8311414