Terrorism and the American future: stories we tell ourselves ... by gimleteye

I was unexpectedly surprised by a weekend NPR interview with a 20-something on the public outbursts of happiness at news of Bin Laden's death. It was along the following line: that she was ten years old in 2001 and so for most of her conscious life she has lived with the shadow of an unknown enemy. Bin Laden. Thus, the crowds of young people demonstrating on the eve of Bin Laden's death with chants of "USA! USA!" were rejoicing that the 9/11 monkey was off their backs.

For a fifty something like me, I hadn't considered how our world would appear had I come of age in 2001. To me that year seems like last week. When I was ten in 1964, my world was the Cold War hangover from the Second World War. It wasn't Korea around our house or the Bay of Pigs: it was Europe and the devastation. When I was twenty in 1974, there was nothing to celebrate: we had Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and Watergate.

A cross-section of young Americans are living with deep uncertainty as a permanent feature of life without historical context. It was still the American Century in 1964, when I was ten. My parents took us to London that year. The dollar was worth twice the British pound then. Now? If you don't know the answer, you may not have a full grasp of where 9/11 fits in America's geometry.

The over-riding fact through which our young are growing is that Age of American Exceptionalism is over. We don't need to measure this in national attitudes. It screeches from the national economy, performing more or less as a vassal consumer of products mostly made in low cost labor nations. We can maintain the illusions of prosperity through the creation of asset bubbles; that is precisely what happened in the past decade from the dot.com boom to the rip-roaring growth of the financial sector of the economy by encouraging consumers to use homes as ATM's. This is the world our 20 something's came of age, in.

Where do we go from here? My metrics to measure that line, as readers know, are the environment and the schemes that polluters use to wriggle out of paying for the costs of pollution. My experience is on the ground; from decades of working as a volunteer leader, sometimes a consultant, and lately as president of Friends of the Everglades; a small grass roots organization based in Miami that has taken on some of the most important environmental litigation in the nation, fighting for water quality and Everglades restoration in federal courts.

The battles we are fighting are not infected with Bin Laden's. Our battles are with home-grown enemies of democracy who wrap themselves in the American flag, expensive suits, neat haircuts, and virtues cobbled together from self-righteousness. How do you explain this to a 20 something who is convinced, that for one night the death of a terrorist is an answered prayer?

On Bruce Ritchie's blog, FloridaEnvironments, the weekend headline was, "Session could have been worse but it was still bad, environmentalists say." I have heard the same narrative at the end of legislative sessions for twenty years. "It was not as bad at the end as we were afraid it might be," the article quotes David Cullen, Sierra Club lobbyist. But if every session weakens regulations and ratchets down expectations, what remains is a baseline that begins to be unrecognizable from the values we were trying to protect in the first place. In 2003 Jeb Bush sent his environmental minister, David Struhs, to the steps of a Miami federal courthouse to claim in the press and in the media that changes to Everglades protection law reinforced the state and federal agreements made a decade earlier: it only took seven years for another federal judge to rule that it was all a farce and that the state, for twenty five years, has not been a good steward of the Everglades. But what do our 20 something's know about this? This history that shows how the state of the environment reflects the state of our democracy.

What carpet baggers in Florida could not achieve during the housing boom-- the elimination of virtually all barriers to rampant land speculation, sprawl, and development in wetlands and watersheds--they achieved during this economic and financial crisis. This legislative session was a bonanza for them, showing a profound disrespect for the bipartisan values for the environment that existed in Florida before our 20 somethings were born.

It was also a legislative session built on public indifference, or, a public so absorbed in the economic emergency that they didn't care to understand how we got here, from there. So the questions arise; how should we talk to our 20 somethings? What narrative should we be telling, to make our children believe it is possible to recover values we have lost by papering over our national decline? If we don't find a collective voice to express a better future, it is every man and woman for themselves.

(The graphic at the top was saved from a 1999 edition of the magazine, Adbusters, as the dot.com bubble took flight.)

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