I don’t recall who said it but since the world began old ladies have always claimed that the strawberries tasted sweeter when they were girls. I don’t know how much of that is reflected in Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column:
I want to stay with 9/11 to say something that struck me hard after the ceremonies last Saturday. The grief felt and expressed had to do with more than the memories of that day 20 years ago. It also had to do with right now.
It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of 20 years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.
Rather than recapping her litany of “lost threads” I want to focus on this:
The country we are experiencing now is one of people in different groups ganging up on each other. We all see this. It’s all division, driven by identity politics, race, gender, class. Twenty years ago we were grateful for cops, now we denigrate them and they leave and we argue about why they left. A rising generation of voters who were children when 9/11 happened and who became conscious of history during the 2008 economic crisis see (and have been well taught!) the imperfections, mistakes and sins of their own country but have no human memory of the abuses of other systems, of how damaging deep socialism, and communism, have been. The passion of their emerging beliefs will engender opposing passions. They already are.
Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?
Following the trauma and drama of 9/11 we started discovering in some new way our nation’s meaning—what it was in history, meant in history, meant to us. We talked about it. We saw: The first thing the firemen did after the towers fell was put up the flag.
Do you see how she’s romanticizing our national response after the attacks? The problem is that it evaporated much, much more quickly than she remembers. One of the departed blogs in my emeritus list on the right, American Future, documented meticulously the rapidity with which major media outlets, especially the New York Times, went from national solidarity to the same old partisan bickering and division. It was a matter of weeks.
As to the balance of her point, what would you expect? Different people have different experiences. Approaching 20% of the population is from somewhere else and, contrary to the Disney-fied version of the world in which some believe, whether you’re from Azerbaijan or Mexico or Zambia you undoubtedly have notably different values, views, and expectations than if you’re a WASP from Kansas. And those WASPs from Kansas have different values, views, and expectations than people who live in Lawndale on the South Side of Chicago. As the bullets whiz by their ears every evening things don’t look so rosy. It’s amazing they’re as positive as they are.
It would be possible to inculcate some of those values, views, and expectations in the children of those recent immigrants and people from out-groups. Believe it or not the public school system was created with just that objective. Read John Dewey if you don’t believe me. His approach to public education was received wisdom for several generations of public educators. But those days are long gone and as long the public school system no longer has that mission which it manifestly does not, it’s not going to happen.
