"They took a vote": Remembering 9/11

 

Twenty-four years ago, terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Four years ago, George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of the fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, who on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.  
 
Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”
 
Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know”: “On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”
 
Bush celebrated the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.
 
That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy the terrorists attacked. America had seemed to drift since the end of the Cold War twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, they thought, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity, which had been dropping, soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced. He and his loyalists attacked any opposition to their measures as an attack on “the homeland.”

They tarred those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American—either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks—and set out to make sure such people could not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions.

In 2010 the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013 it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021 it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional. In that year, a former Republican president claimed he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.

Former president Bush mused that "[a] malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment." He said: "There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such a mentality means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they took a vote. 

-Heather Cox Richardson