Wall Street Journal: One terror, two moods [Excerpt]

09/21/2001

We keep hearing that America has finally lost its innocence. But I'm not so sure. We have lost thousands of lives, and two tall towers, and for now we have lost what was always an unrealistic sense that in this post-Cold War era we are safe from sudden brutal attack spawned in far-off lands. As I write this, the reek of destruction is still wafting across Manhattan, a metallic smell of ash on a cool evening breeze. A reminder that we have lost plenty.

But when we speak of American innocence, what comes to my mind is something much bigger than a naivete now fled. I think we are talking about a kind of open-hearted trust, a society that for all its quirks remains perhaps the least corrupt on earth. And if we speak of American innocence in that finest sense of the word -- of civility and trust -- what stands out is how very much we have not lost.

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This trust in each other has been clear not only in the flourishing of flags and the making of public speeches, but in the desire of Americans to help each other, and the need to grieve for people most of us have never met. In moments of crisis, a person's true nature tends to show through; the same holds for societies. New York is famous for its hard-boiled ways -- I keep remembering a routine morning about three years ago, when I rode a crowded subway to the World Trade Center, and as we all piled off, an old man gestured at the throng and said to no one in particular, "All these people, and no human beings!" It was a classic New York wisecrack. But faced with disaster, New York has revealed itself as a city filled with human beings, some of whom died trying to help others. Across America right now, we are angry at our enemies, but almost unnervingly gentle toward each other, because we feel so keenly the value of human life.

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To bring this more up to date, America's experience last week was terrible, but perhaps not as crippling to the soul as are such awful betrayals as took place in China, in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, when the government turned its guns on its own people. Other reports of true loss of innocence pour almost daily over the wires, in the form of such stuff as more Falun Gong practitioners tortured to death in Chinese police custody -- a hideous, unjust end that evokes no official statements of horror at the deed, no public comfort for the families. Chinese citizens who show concern for the innocents thus rubbed out risk being not thanked and embraced on national television, but arrested, tortured or even murdered themselves.

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