From violation to enlightenment

It's Sept. 11, 2011.

You can't get a decent ball game or '30s movie on your stadium-seating TV.

The 500 channels are all carrying commentary and discreet advertising to memorialize the 10th anniversary of 2001.

Only "Crossfire" gives half the show to something else, a debate on whether the country is ready for campaign-finance reform.

The saturation coverage misses only one thing: how it felt to be an American in 2001 - and perhaps even grow up a little.

"What, me worry?" Our grin at the beginning of that year wasn't really goofy. After all, we had gotten through an election that shook all branches of government without permanent damage. But heedless began to seem witless amid falling dotcoms, real or rigged energy shortages, and unemployment that was no easier to take when we were told the jobless rate was twice as high in '82. Chairman Greenspan's earlier alarm at irrational exuberance began to seem quaint as we hoped for just a little tap dance now and then.

Forget all the money that Enron, then the world's largest energy trading company, gave to its fellow Texan in the White House. The spectacular bankruptcy would

wind up being investigated for its business and labor practices. But didn't everybody own a couple of shares of some fallen idol in 2001 or, aargh, know someone who sold it early at $84 instead of late at 84 cents?

How piddling all our getting and spending seemed when Sept. 11 broke our hearts with flame and mass murder from the skies. Suddenly our anthem's "rocket's red glare" and "bombs bursting in air" would stick in our throats - and be played wordlessly at a Ground Zero memorial by a sobbing solo trumpet.

More Americans (at least 3,650) were killed in a single day on American soil in the Civil War Battle of Antietam. But the figure of more than 2,300 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor was exceeded by even the mercifully declining estimates of World Trade Center dead or missing (2,940) plus the terrorists' victims at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. Then began the toll of anthrax victims.

Of course it wasn't the numbers. Americans in 2001 were becoming newly introduced to the essence, if not the remembered words, of John Donne's 17th-century devotional lines: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."

America has always had citizens involved in mankind, whether a Clara Barton, who organized the American Red Cross, or an unpublicized Peace Corps volunteer in the African desert.

The year 2001, though, rang in with cries of American "triumphalism," letting the rest of the world and its treaties go by. Even after Sept. 11 and the with-us-or-with-the-terrorists rhetoric, one op-ed blared: "The US goal: unilateral supremacy." But that referred to official Washington.

Americans in general were seen by historians and other close observers that year as looking beyond unilateralism, beyond the isolation of what one called their "continental island."

They were becoming sensitive to others' problems being their problems.

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