Senior accounting and finance major
I don’t remember much about 9/11 now. It was more than half my life ago, back when kids played with Pokémon cards or whatever it is I should be nostalgic about. I don’t remember the exact details of the day or even most of what happened. Besides a few images of places I was and things people said, there is one thing that sticks out clearly in my memories: the fear.
I grew up in Fair Lawn, N.J. — close enough to Manhattan that we could see the smoke for a week after the tragedy. Everyone around me knew someone who lost someone. My dad’s office was close enough to ground zero to be evacuated (thankfully, he was at home waiting for a contractor that day).
At the young age of 10, I couldn’t process the facts of what had occurred; I couldn’t grasp the sophisticated political realities of what was happening around me. All I knew was that someone, somewhere, hated me because I was American — and, I was told, because I was Jewish — and that I needed to be afraid that they would hurt me, hurt my family, hurt my community or hurt my country. And so I was.
In the 12 years since, our entire world has changed. Before then, we had always been America, the bastion of freedom and democracy that would do whatever it took to protect the innocent around the world. Since then, we’re still all that — but now, we’re not just protecting the innocent. We’re also protecting ourselves.
Instead of being the America that fights bad people because they’re bad, we’re the America that fights bad people because otherwise they’ll fight us first. We fight because we have to — because we don’t ever want to deal with that fear again.
Obviously, this is completely irrational. The level of fear we have of the world as a whole is unhealthy, and the way we respond to it is incredibly harmful to us and everyone else. The war in Iraq was a complete failure, and Afghanistan wasn’t much better. Entering Syria is, I feel, a complete mistake, but we’re going to do it anyway. How can we not? We have a whole generation of people who are frightened to their cores — frightened of what happens if we sit back and let these things develop on their own. We are constantly assailed by the politics of fear — and the politics of fear always wins.
The worst part is that the people making the decisions aren’t always acting upon our joint fears. There is plenty to be gained from war; it’s what saved us from the Great Depression, took us to space and helped us develop the edge we once had in science education. There are also many powerful corporations, individuals and governments that would benefit from a constant state of war. These people push the American government to act not out of a need for safety, but for their own benefit. And we don’t stop them; we’re too afraid of what happens if we do.
Through the past 12 years, the politics of fear have controlled our lives. They’ve led us to do things we would never otherwise do (see the Transportation Security Administration, the National Security Agency and Fox News’ viewership). They’ve led us to two wars and many more military excursions. They’ve led us to maintain a bloated military, which we will never stop overfunding. And, worst of all, they’ve led us to fuel them further.
Because now that we’re afraid, nothing will ever make us unafraid. And that, more than the lives lost, is the true horror of 9/11.
Ezra Fishman is a senior accounting and finance major. He can be reached at efishmandbk@gmail.com.
