How many times in the last few months have you heard one of the TV talking heads say something like, "The events of September 11 have changed America forever … nothing will ever be the same." With that kind of rhetoric you may have even wondered if America as a nation would survive this onslaught against our freedom and way of life.
Now I’ll be among the first to admit that the effects of that day would be hard to surpass in terms of audacity and magnitude of horror. But sitting here from my middle-of-the-baby-boom perspective (I was born in 1950), I can’t help but wonder if every generation of young adults has its own set of "nothing-will-ever-be-the-same" experiences.
My generation had at least a decade in which the whole world was turned on its head. Our music was radically different from what our parents listened to, most of them hated it and were only too anxious to tell us how bad it was. Songs like Bob Dylan’s "The Times They Are A-Changin’," reflected our topsy-turvy youth. Many of us challenged and pushed aside the traditional taboos about sex, drugs and relationships. A popular comedian of the time lamented, "What happened to the good old days when sex was dirty, the air was clean and a gay man was just a happy guy?"
Perhaps our challenges to the "establishment" were more of a reaction to the frightening world we found ourselves in. Throughout the 60s we watched and wept as one great leader after another was assassinated. First President Kennedy in 1963, then Dr. King in 1968. Just two months later Bobby Kennedy, campaigning for the same office his slain brother had held, fell to an assassin’s bullet.
Each evening, Walter Kronkite or the Huntley-Brinkley team brought us more and more depressing news. We heard and saw the body counts as young American men and women died in the Southeast Asian meat grinder. Race riots swept through the urban centers of our own nation, as frustrated people looted and set their own neighborhoods afire. My senior year of high school I clearly remember wondering how America could possibly survive long enough for me to reach adulthood. It felt like our nation was tearing itself apart. But survive it did. We changed, we adapted, and we learned from our mistakes.
For my parents’ generation, the challenges they faced seem nobler than those we faced in the 60s. Their first crucible was the Great Depression. My own dad told me how he, his father and brother bought a loaf of bread and a bottle of ketchup and lived on nothing by ketchup sandwiches for weeks. Many of the young people of the 1930s must have believed they were unwilling guinea pigs living in the last miserable days of a failed experiment called America.
Then in 1941, just as things were beginning to look up, our nation was plunged into World War II. As never before, young American men and women sacrificed their youth and many their very lives to defend their way of life. Thankfully the Depression had tempered and strengthened them, producing in them an indomitable spirit. When it was all over, America survived and emerged as the most powerful nation on the planet.
Yet as strong and unified as America found itself in 1945, just 80 years earlier the nation found itself emerging from a fratricidal civil war – a conflict that had threatened to tear it apart along the Mason-Dixon Line. Young men hurled themselves against cannon balls and saber blades by the millions. Those not killed outright often suffered a slow and agonizing death from infection or disease. The luckier ones survived minus an arm or a leg.
Yet many of the young volunteers on both sides of the conflict were proud to serve and fight. Those from the North fought to foster the ideal of freedom for all, while those from the South fought to save their way of life. I’m sure for many it seemed impossible that the nation – the Union – would survive.
Nearly torn asunder, the nation somehow sewed itself back together and after a period of healing emerged even stronger than before the fighting began.
Now think about the 20-somethings living along our prosperous Eastern Seaboard in 1776. Many of them lived comfortably under the protection of the British Crown. Historians tell us only a fraction of the colonists ever fully supported the American Revolution. I’m sure many of these young people – revolutionaries or loyalists – believed the idea of a rebellion against the strongest nation on the planet was foolhardy. When Cornwallis surrendered to American officers in 1781, many probably believed the fledgling nation could not possibly survive on its own? But survive it did, far eclipsing the power of the country from whom it won its independence.
Today, just as in 1781, the talking heads and nay-sayers warn us that everything is different. They tell us America is threatened as it had never been before. You yourself may question whether we as a nation of wonderfully diverse and often contrary people, can survive this latest onslaught.
Yes, things have changed since September 11.
Yes, America has never been threatened like this. But we have been threatened, and history has proven that we can and will survive.
Perhaps we will emerge from this crisis a little more wary, a little more cautious, a little less trusting. But just like our parents, and grandparents and ancestors over the centuries, we will survive and America will continue to be the great place we call home.
