Charlie Harper: Trump, 9-11 and an ex-Egyptian
My trip to Washington last week was fairly routine and normal. Well, as "normal" as Washington can ever be, let alone during the run-up to a presidential election. Or as "normal" as it can be the first week Congress has returned from August recess.
I flew home the afternoon of September 10. I imagine it was as normal as it was 14 years ago on the same date. As we now all know too well, our country and the world changed to anything but normal that next morning.
Late on the evening of my return and in anticipation of the anniversary of September 11, I posted the following on my Facebook page while sharing a friend's picture of the twin towers, taken on a prior "normal" day:
"To me, the significance of 9/11 lies in 9/10 and 9/12. The events of 9/11 did not change who we are. On 9/10 we were us, but complacent and generally satisfied. On 9/12 we were Americans. No adjectives or hyphens. May we one day again be able to find the unity of 9-12 without the horrors and sacrifices of those on 9-11."
I didn't put a lot of thought into writing that, but I have thought a lot about September 12, 2001, and the days and weeks after. We all can recount where we were when we learned the planes had hit the World Trade Center. When we learned another had hit the Pentagon. When we understood our country was under attack and at least one jetliner was missing, later found crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When the towers fell.
I remember the days and weeks after well. Fear was real. It was not the same sort of occasional fear I can remember from the last years of the Cold War. This was real. We had been attacked on our own soil.
Wall Street remained closed for about a week. Air travel was suspended. As someone who grew up in the shadow of Atlanta's airport, it was surreal to drive by and see no activity. I pulled off one day and took a look at the planes lined up along the taxiways. The lack of movement was striking for the world's busiest airport. The sound of silence was deafening.
What I remember most from this time was that the fear propelled a unity of purpose that I have not seen before or since. We truly did our best to put petty differences aside. The choices ahead of us were not easy. Many are easy to debate in retrospect. But we did our best to make the immediate ones as Americans.
Eventually, politics became politics again. Our differences re-emerged as our fears subsided. We've managed to divide ourselves among party lines. We've managed to divide those within the parties against each other.
Fourteen years ago we were united by fear. The word thus far of this campaign cycle is "anger."
Frankly, for very different reasons, this has begun to cause my feelings of fear to reemerge. America's strength is in our unity. I don't see much talk of brining Americans together in current coverage of the presidential race.
As fate would have it, I rode past the rally Donald Trump and others were having on the Capitol lawn during my DC trip. My driver, an immigrant from Egypt, had already been chatting about politics a bit when we passed. I mentioned my apprehension that this campaign, on the left and on the right, seems destined to drive an even deeper wedge between us as Americans.
He suggested I look at his home country as a comparison. He said it's good when the people get to express themselves. That's a sign that the people are free. We, unlike Egypt, do not have a history of military coups. We have our issues, but we've always solved them. By the people.
He's raised his children as Americans. He still believes in the American dream and government by the people, for the people. He believes in it because he's lived it. He's also lived where it isn't. He chose America.
I couldn't let the irony pass that it was an immigrant who told me not to worry about the fury being whipped up by the GOP's anti-immigration candidate. The driver says we're a bigger country than him, and bigger people than that. He says we'll be fine.
I hope he's right. It's up to each of us to prove him so.
Charlie Harper, author and editor of the Peach Pundit blog, writes on Georgia politics and government; www.peachpundit.com.
This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 2:22 PM with the headline "Charlie Harper: Trump, 9-11 and an ex-Egyptian ."