9/14

Neo-neocon suggests that the harsh division and partisanship in our politics and culture is a result of 9/11:

It’s not unusual for a trauma—and make no doubt about it, 9/11 was a national trauma—to end up causing divisions. This isn’t just politics, it’s human nature.

When we have sustained a terrible blow from an outrageous and grievous attack, some people will get angry, some scared, some frightened, and some sad—or a combination of these feelings in differing proportions. This is true whether the event be a non-politically motivated crime against a single person or a large-scale terrorist attack such as 9/11. Some will place the blame where I believe it rightly belongs—on the attackers—and see the event as a call to action against them. Some will view it as a call for introspection, a need for soul-searching in order to understand where we went wrong. Some will blame the victims.

And some will want to forget, and pretend it never happened. They are likely to become angry at those who insist they remember. I believe that at least some of the rage directed at George Bush was due to this phenomenon. Not right away, not when the gaping wound was fresh. But for a long time afterward he insisted on reminding us, and on labeling the perpetrators as evil rather than misunderstood. He went after them with a single-minded and non-morally-relativistic focus. He didn’t want to forget, and he didn’t want us to, either, although he did want us to continue to go about our daily lives in the most normal fashion possible.

Now, eight years later, the country is riven by discord.