Monday Morning – Put to the test: Our boundless optimism

Whatever the ultimate outcome of Tuesday’s devastating terrorist attack, there is a palpable sense in its wake that America has been permanently changed.

For more than 10 years, the nation and much of the world had enjoyed the fruits of dramatic political and technological change.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the easing of East-West tensions after more than 40 years of Cold War touched off an era of good feeling that seemed to be almost boundless in its optimism and promise.

For a moment, it seemed that the world, save for a few small corners, had shed its terrible history of destructiveness.

We truly were growing into a global economy.

Trade barriers were falling, and technological change promised to improve the standard of living for hundreds of millions of people. It was a revolution unlike any other in the history of civilization. And most of all, it was a peaceful revolution.

Indeed, it was a time when democracy and the American way of life were given center stage. We basked in the glory of the successes that sprang from the huge sacrifices of previous generations, without ever really knowing sacrifice ourselves.

If anything, the destruction of the World Trade Center sent a clear message that as much as things had changed, they are still the same.

The world is a very dangerous place, and the freedoms that we enjoy cannot be taken for granted.

Indeed, the calamity that took place Tuesday was life altering in ways that will mark this nation for years to come.

In this age of promise and modernism at the threshold of a new millennium, it’s cruelly ironic that ethnic and religious hatreds as ancient as civilization itself were the driving forces behind the wanton attack.

We, as a nation, tried to minimize and dismiss those hatreds, perhaps because they are so antithetical to our way of life, or perhaps because we were so caught up in our own self-righteousness.

In that sense, it is not surprising that it took a tragedy as large as Tuesday’s to convince us that such threats are real – and growing with every passing day.

But beyond even that, it revealed how truly vulnerable we are and how fallacious our belief has been that we could retreat into isolationism and ignore that threat.

Some have likened the disaster to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which launched us into World War II. It is in every way, and on a far more destructive scale. But it is also very much akin to the sinking of the Titanic or the destruction of the Hindenberg.

They were symbols of an age in which our belief in technology and reason were thought capable of overcoming the dark forces of hatred. And their loss foreshadowed the terrible decades that were to follow.

The collapse of the World Trade Center is the same to our generation. It was an unbelievable and unbelievably catastrophic event that sprang from the depths of our worst nightmares.

Then, as now, the first question that came to our lips was: “How could this happen?”

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In the wake of the attack, our attention has been focused on the immediate, as it should be. We must search for survivors and count the dead, and find solace in the incredible acts of heroism that marked that day.

But the world will go on, and the immediate must give way to the larger challenges that lie ahead. We stand at a crossroads. We are a nation at war, in a conflict unlike any other.

It is waged by fanatics who have no regard for their own lives or the lives of others. They are ruthless and implacable. As President Bush said, we can “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

It will take great resolve and sacrifice to defeat that elusive enemy. But as part of our resolve, we must not give way to our own baser instincts.

As another president, Abraham Lincoln, said in the wake of another cataclysmic event on the battlefield at Gettysburg: We must resolve “that these honored dead shall not have died in vain, that that nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Keith Girard is the editor of InvestmentNews.