Liberty or Madness

The tenth anniversary of the events of September 11th, 2001 left me, like all Americans, deeply unsettled. I was not just upset for the victims and the families of victims—of which I was almost a member, as my father was a radio engineer who often worked at the transmitter site at the top of 1 World Trade—but I was hurt and angry on behalf of the veterans, active duty soldiers, first responders, and their families as well. When our president refers to our generation as the “9/11 Generation”, and when our vice president remarks that "never before in our history has America asked so much over such a sustained period of an all-volunteer force," the tragicomic understatement in their words is almost too much to bear.

As a nation, we’ve been hurt by the lies—by how this president campaigned as anti-war and stridently anti-Patriot Act, yet has involved our nation in yet another conflict irrelevant to our security interests. President Obama has consistently delayed the deadline for drawdown in Iraq, and has perpetuated the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld police-state practices which have done irreparable damage to the population’s perception and practice of our constitutional rights by expanding the use of extrajudicial killings and wiretaps of US citizens and further endangering an already-damaged notion of due process of law.

Our citizenry has been so psychologically scarred that we are literally terrorized by our own government into believing that these sacrifices of liberty, nihilistic overseas adventurist wars which have absolutely no connection to the events of 9/11, and our government’s schizophrenic actions and responses in each of these cases are somehow all related to the cause of freedom. This is ludicrous. It is a unique breed of violent, uninhibited madness.

Yes, the tenth anniversary was depressing. More has changed in this decade than in any other in the history of the American republic—that’s because this has been the decade that has witnessed the American republic’s death. I regret to admit the veracity of Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” We have given up our liberties for a hollow, pretend protection, and in the trade have lost both real freedom and real safety from tyranny, seen or unseen, domestic or foreign.

Our generation will be defined by how we deal with the reality of what happened on September 11, 2001 and how successful we are in dismantling the fascist excesses of power, created under the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration in the events’ wake and strengthened and canonized by the Obama-Biden-Clinton administration. To truly honor the lives lost at Ground Zero, in Shanksville, and in Washington D.C., first we must, with great conviction, oppose the resulting fraudulent wars of imperialism and demand that our government—for the people, by the people—respect the rights inherent of American citizenship, endowed by our creator, reinforced in our compact of law, and owed to each other as inheritors of the American experience.

Ivy League students have the blessing of intelligence, resources, work ethic and access that primes us for great success in whichever endeavors we choose. But we have too much cynicism and not enough courage or heart—and we are not always successful in choosing the endeavors that support the cause of regular citizens against encroaching powers, public or private. Our leaders’ rhetoric should serve to inspire us in reverse: The vice president is right that much has been asked of our nation. We must deliver something, but it must be against the wishes of the powerful and for the benefit of those who have been consistently lied to, spied on, sent to die in the Middle East, arrested and held without cause, arrested for practicing free political speech in their cities and towns, and arrested or detained for the color of the skin and their expressions of faith. And, too, for all those who have raised legitimate unanswered questions about the events of September 11, 2001, and who have been silenced, threatened, or shunned.

We are the 9/11 Generation, as President Obama and others declare us. But that does not mean that we are obliged to keep sacrificing for a corrupt system of power instead of, as citizens, demanding its fundamental reconstitution; this moniker does not mean that we will turn over our liberties easily, or succumb to the cloak and dagger untruths which serve the powerful against the many. By the horror that we have lived and mourned on this tenth anniversary, we must remember that only we have the power to demand the end of lies and the return of justice. We are the only people who can make things right.

Andrew B. Lohse ’12 is an English  major at Dartmouth College.