9/11 Remembrance
Jeffrey Quiggle, Communications Director, Collin County Democratic Party
On a bright, sunny September morning 19 years ago, Americans for the first time since the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor faced a foreign attack on our own soil. By the end of the day, Manhattan’s World Trade Center was a smoking ruin, the Pentagon had a gaping, burning hole in one side, and a lone United Airlines airliner had nosedived into a field in Pennsylvania; over 3,000 Americans were dead.
Get Collin County Democratic Party’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In subsequent days, shocked Americans rallied around a wounded New York City, around a stunned military, and around grieving families. We cheered when our President stood with firemen at Ground Zero and defiantly declared, “The people who knocked these towers down will be hearing from all of us soon.”
Within days, military special forces were engaging al-Qaeda militants and their Taliban allies in Afghanistan; within weeks large-scale military operations were ongoing in the country, sweeping the Taliban from power. President Bush’s approval rating was in the 90% range. The country was united in grief and anger, and would move mountains, literally, to avenge the deaths of those 3,000 Americans.
Nineteen years later, 3,000 American deaths represents just three days in August, when 1,000 Americans were dying each day from COVID-19. As of September 10, more than 190,000 Americans were dead, nearly double the American war deaths in the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq War combined. Americans, instead of uniting to vanquish a common foe that shows no mercy, gives no quarter, and kills randomly, have spent the past few months of the pandemic bickering about where the Coronavirus came from, whether or not to follow basic public health recommendations, and arguing wild conspiracy theories. Republicans at the Federal, Texas State, and Collin County level, have called this pandemic a hoax, played down the severity, resisted public health measures that would have helped contain the spread, and, with a few exceptions, have actively made the situation worse rather than better. Would they have called the smoking ruins of the Twin Towers a hoax?
Faced with this disaster, largely of their own making, and with little interest in actually leading, Republicans at the national, state and county levels have resorted to diversion and distraction techniques in a desperate attempt to change the subject. The President, some in our state government — Lt. Governor Dan Patrick in particular — and others in our Congressional and State House delegations have launched vicious and baseless attacks on Democratic political leaders, on demonstrators against police brutality, and even on everyday people responsibly wearing a face mask. They stoke violence and push Americans farther apart hoping to divide and conquer in the midst of the confusion they themselves have sown. At this point it is difficult to imagine the General Election and the aftermath to be without widespread civil unrest and even violence.
My hope is that we find our collective compassion and empathy, that we remember we are all Americans with a common history of meeting challenges head on and overcoming them. We can start that by electing leaders with compassion and empathy, leaders who will let science guide our pandemic response and leverage our technological and industrial prowess to beat back this devastating pandemic. Since 9/11, the militants who attacked our country have been largely beaten back and have not been able to mount new attacks in the US. Their organizations are diminished, acting only locally in faraway countries. The question for our time is this: Is a virus the thing that beats America when al-Qaeda couldn’t? We cannot let that happen.
