Remembering Terkel's wisdom on day of terror11
Ten years ago today, I was in the newsroom sitting next to Jack Mabley, watching the terror unfold on live TV, wiping away tears as I worried about my sister in Manhattan, wondering how my wife would handle this news with our twins in kindergarten and our toddler at home - and taking column notes as I talked on the phone with Studs Terkel.
I called Terkel, not just because he was a dear friend of Mabley's and I thought his observations would make for an interesting column, but because I thought he would offer up some wisdom that would help me get through that tragic day.
"We are stunned, startled, horrified and outraged as one should be in the face of horror," the then-89-year-old Chicago legend and working-class historian said, his words flowing with a calm ease and smooth rhythm as if they were part of a jazz riff. The author acknowledged that I and the rest of our shellshocked nation were in disbelief, but Terkel wasn't surprised.
"It is something that happens in the Third World, and we see it and casually say, 'Yes,'" Terkel says. "And now it's happened here. That makes it different, doesn't it?"
So different that for weeks afterward, the normal engine noise of a jet approaching O'Hare compelled us nervous suburbanites to hold our breath until we were certain the plane wasn't going to crash into a building. So different that routine office mail was opened by an employee wearing gloves in a special trailer so as not to unleash anthrax across the newsroom. So different that some workers in the Sears Tower bought parachutes so they'd be ready when the terror reached Chicago. So different that hundreds of shoppers at Woodfield gathered in the atrium for a moment of silence on a national day of prayer. So different that American flags dominated the landscape from high school football fields and tollway overpasses to front porches and suit lapels. So different that our Republican and Democratic politicians gathered on the steps of the Capitol that first night to sing a teary, bipartisan version of "God Bless America."
"This is a new chapter," proclaimed Bernard Beck, a respected Northwestern University associate professor of sociology I phoned after the twin towers fell.
"I was a little bit too dramatic then," Beck, a 73-year-old professor emeritus and an actor, says now. "It wasn't all that new. It was just new to us. Other countries had this and worse for quite a while."
That's a point Terkel made so well and so casually during our Sept. 11 chat that as soon as he warned me that "what I am saying isn't going to be popular," I censored many of his comments about the role our government had played in shaping the world leading up to Sept. 11. Terkel had given that topic more thought before Sept. 11 than most people did after.
"From the very beginning, we were writing the historical analysis of this before we even knew what happened," Beck says.
I figured that a decade after Sept. 11, Americans would be accustomed to the occasional suicide bomber, daily threats of terrorism, armed soldiers on street corners, ever-present metal detectors and the security searches required for everything from a grade-school band concert to a shopping trip at the mall.
The initial fear that erupted on Sept. 11 faded in the same way the infatuation of a new love matures. "You settle into a relationship," Beck says.
That lifestyle is easier to maintain, but it does allow us to ease back into old habits. Politicians who once vowed to pull together and do everything they could to help our great nation now mock and ridicule each other as they focus on the main goal of winning elections.
"When everybody's life was at stake, you didn't notice that the guy in the foxhole next to you had bad breath," Beck says. Now, we do.
In the wake of Sept. 11, Americans seemed to have this universal understanding that "we have to do whatever we can to be safe," Beck says. "Now it's a drag to have to take off my shoes at the airport."
Unimaginable then, we now seem more engaged in the latest tweet about "Dancing With the Stars" than we do about news from the front of one of our "War on Terror" battlefields. Some suburbanites will view today's Sept. 11 tributes as just another annoying, tedious delay to endure on their pilgrimage to watch Bears football.
We changed after Sept. 11. And sometimes we changed back. That's just the way it goes.
"History goes on," Beck says. "Politics goes on."
And the wisdom of Terkel, who died in 2008, also goes on.
"We must face this not as a superpower, but as a nation of people," Terkel said during our Sept. 11, 2001, conversation in comparing terrorism to a cancer. "A real honest-to-God doctor wants to get at the root of the cancer. I think it's curable, too."
Wars that attempt to wipe out our enemies merely treat the symptoms, said Terkel. He suggested peace would be attainable only through "the power of common sense and the power of humanity."
As we look back on the past decade since Sept. 11, those ideals of common sense and humanity remain goals for our future.