Is Our National Soul Any Better a Year Later?

As published in The Dallas Morning News, September 11, 2002

As the sun rose on Sept. 12 last year, commuters already were driving through the smoke from the still smoldering Pentagon to get to their jobs in Washington. President Bush, along with the secretary of defense and members of Congress, had emphasized the importance of getting back to our lives as usual. They urged Americans to display courage rather than to cower in fear. The Pentagon opened for business, as did Congress and the White House. We as citizens followed suit.

Like many others in America, I praised the courage displayed on Sept. 11 by the firefighters, the police and the heroes of Flight 93. Regular, everyday people rose to face evil by laying down their lives for people they never had met. While I had been critical of the direction of American culture for a number of years – noting the breakdown of the family and the loss of virtue – the response to Sept. 11 encouraged me. I saw what I thought had died in America well before Sept. 11: the spirit of patriots.

The sorrow that swept over America in the aftermath of Sept. 11 seemed to carry the frivolity and decadence of the 1990s away with it. We saw a return to the principles of classic America. Church and synagogue pews were full, divorce filings were withdrawn, and military recruitment offices were full of prospective soldiers.

But like so many New Year’s resolutions, all of those have vanished in recent months. A year after Sept. 11, many of us are asking if our national soul is any better for the hardship we have endured and if today is more like Sept. 10, 2001, or Sept. 12, 2001.

I fear that if we don’t take on the difficult task of distilling the moral significance of the overwhelming experiences of the past year, we will lose the moral clarity and focus that was forced on us a year ago. Most critically, we must help our children gain a deeper understanding of good and evil as a result of this national ordeal.

Regrettably, the nation’s largest education organization hasn’t helped us. The National Education Association’s proposed material for dealing with Sept. 11 was full of getting-in-touch-with-feelings and other undirected emotional wallowing. As one example, it recommends and links to Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization whose mission statement is “to seek effective nonviolent responses to terrorism and identify a commonality with all people similarly affected by violence throughout the world.”

Sept. 11 was a unique event, not one that should be linked to all suffering around the world. We must not lose ourselves in moral confusion nor think we were attacked for anything we had done wrong. It was precisely because we are a nation dedicated to freedom, equality and human rights that we were attacked. Those concepts are anathema to radical Islam and to the bin Ladens of the world. We were attacked because we were good, not because we were bad. That is what we should be teaching.

And in the teaching of good and bad and right and wrong, we have many important lessons to share with our children as a result of Sept. 11 – lessons about America’s strengths and lessons about the heroes and the role models who have risen from the ashes of that terrible day. The passengers of Flight 93 showed us what seemingly ordinary civilians did to save their nation’s capital. New York’s firefighters showed us the utmost self-sacrifice by running up into the towers while others were running out. Rick Rescorla, head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, remained in Tower Two singing “God Bless America” until all but six of 2,700 employees in his charge had been safely evacuated. He perished that day, walking back up the stairs to look for stragglers.

These are the new heroes of our generation: firefighters, police officers and bystanders. In recent years, I have made a practice of asking students who their heroes are. Too many had no answer. Now, they have no excuse.

Many heroes died, as they were born, on Sept. 11. Their lives, though over, are living instructions and monuments. Let us never forget them nor what they did to minimize the loss of lives not their own. We must teach our young people to know heroic qualities, which are deeper than hairstyle and pop-icon glitz. We must teach indispensable virtues like courage, honor and duty. Time will tell what we, as a society, truly learned that terrible September day. It is my hope that America learned once more that good and evil – and right and wrong – are real terms with real meanings. It is my hope that a part of America changed forever – and for the better, not for the trivial and not for the worse.

William J. Bennett is a co-director at Empower America and the author of Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.