September 11: Awakening the Spirit of America Towards the end of September I found myself talking with Quaker boys: all solid citizens, more hard-working, serious and responsible than those aged between 13 and 13 years. -Sixteen year olds should be. But the pacifists, above all, and as a person they were worried, even scared. Bush hadn't yet given his "for us or against us" speech, I think, but the message was getting through: classmates and others had made it clear enough to the kids that criticizing the United States was tantamount to supporting terrorists. To their credit, few teenagers were silent, but they were closer to intimacy than I would have imagined this formidable group of kids could be. Having aligned themselves with evil in the eyes of their school, they felt they could not speak safely. But something strange is happening when national political leaders and people on the street respond to the September 11 attacks by repeating "They are wrong and we are right" and "This is no time for moral relativism: they are evil and we represent good." Did FDR, for example, need to point out that we were right in opposing the attack on Pearl Harbor? Did Lincoln need to clearly express his opposition to moral relativism? Otherwise, why would Bush, Giuliani, et al. raise such points? so determinedly now? Is some broad American public arguing that the terrorists were right or morally good? So who are they talking to? people who are wrong and we are right? Well, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are addressing people who make the following type of argument: “We need to ask ourselves why the terrorists did this. And when we ask that question we arrive at a list of US policies, from the deadly shipping embargo on Iraq to our alliance with an Israeli state that has left Palestinians homeless. Any response we make to terrorist attacks should include a review of those policies. Right? Well, because it seems like we're wrong about something. Apparently the deduction is this: "If our policies were wrong, then the terrorists were right and their actions were justified." Note the ironic convergence: none of the critics of US policy make this inference, only (1) the new patriotic absolutists and (2) the terrorists themselves.