A nonprofit effort to encourage volunteer activities in response to the loss of life which occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the crash in Shanksville, Pa, has had a low-key beginning.
Click on www.911Day.org to “pledge one good deed,” including volunteering for multiple organizations across the country. In Durango, participating organizations include the United Way Serving Southwest Colorado and the Girl Scouts. With greater publicity, there could be more.
The effort is to tap Americans’ generous spirit to create something good in response to the most tragic day in American life since Pearl Harbor, an attack which triggered America’s entry into the wars with Japan and Germany.
The mood of the country in the days and weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, was so different than it is today. The 3,000 victims of the attacks were black, Latino and Muslim as well as white, and there was no hesitancy in embracing the memories of the lives they had lived and their families’ grief. No one suggested that any of them should not have been allowed entry into the country. Americans were one with one another to a greater degree at that time then perhaps ever before.
Where did that shared spirit go?
It did not begin with the presidential election. There has been growing frustration and anger among many Americans with their inability to improve their economic standing, with their recognition that too many jobs have been lost to automation or have gone overseas, and that the future looks no better. And that at the very top, that 1 percent of which they are not a part, have done and are doing very well.
Nor has American military involvement in the Middle East been successful. Religious and sectarian divisions there have proved to be deeper and stronger than we knew or expected, with allied leaders profiting from the corruption. This did not turn out to be an environment where American military could provide a quick fix.
The Olympics which recently took place in Brazil? That produced three weeks of some shared national pride, but the anger and frustration over jobs and security were far deeper.
A couple of national figures are talking about the value of requiring national service from those in their 20s as a partial way to mend the differences which have split us apart. Three months of service could be tied to free college tuition, suggests one. That has merit.
We hope that it does not require another national emergency of great magnitude to bring the country back together again, to repeat the shared feelings that we all felt beginning on the day after 9/11. Surely Americans can create a better future for all which is not again built on the pain and suffering which occurred on 9/11.
