The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [138]
Then came September 11—and Americans felt their world turned upside down.
IN JANUARY 2006, I boarded a C-130 military cargo plane and took off for my first trip into Iraq. Two of my colleagues on the trip—Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee—had made the trip before, and they warned me that the landings in Baghdad could be a bit uncomfortable: To evade potential hostile fire, military flights in and out of Iraq’s capital city engaged in a series of sometimes stomach-turning maneuvers. As our plane cruised through the hazy morning, though, it was hard to feel concerned. Strapped into canvas seats, most of my fellow passengers had fallen asleep, their heads bobbing against the orange webbing that ran down the center of the fuselage. One of the crew appeared to be playing a video game; another placidly thumbed through our flight plans.
It had been four and a half years since I’d first heard reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I had been in Chicago at the time, driving to a state legislative hearing downtown. The reports on my car radio were sketchy, and I assumed that there must have been an accident, a small prop plane perhaps veering off course. By the time I arrived at my meeting, the second plane had already hit, and we were told to evacuate the State of Illinois Building. Up and down the streets, people gathered, staring at the sky and at the Sears Tower. Later, in my law office, a group of us sat motionless as the nightmare images unfolded across the TV screen—a plane, dark as a shadow, vanishing into glass and steel; men and women clinging to windowsills, then letting go; the shouts and sobs from below and finally the rolling clouds of dust blotting out the sun.
I spent the next several weeks as most Americans did—calling friends in New York and D.C., sending donations, listening to the President’s speech, mourning the dead. And for me, as for most of us, the effect of September 11 felt profoundly personal. It wasn’t just the magnitude of the destruction that affected me, or the memories of the five years I’d spent in New York—memories of streets and sights now reduced to rubble. Rather, it was the intimacy of imagining those ordinary acts that 9/11’s victims must have performed in the hours before they were killed, the daily routines that constitute life in our modern world—the boarding of a plane, the jostling as we exit a commuter train, grabbing coffee and the morning paper at a newsstand, making small talk on the elevator. For most Americans, such routines represented a victory of order over chaos, the concrete expression of our belief that so long as we exercised, wore seat belts, had a job with benefits, and avoided certain neighborhoods, our safety was ensured, our families protected.
Now chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act differently, understand the world differently. We would have to answer the call of a nation. Within a week of the attacks, I watched the Senate vote 98–0 and the House vote 420–1 to give the President the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons” behind the attacks. Interest in the armed services and applications to join the CIA soared, as young people across America resolved to serve their country. Nor were we alone. In Paris, Le Monde ran the banner headline “Nous sommes tous Américains” (“We are all Americans”). In Cairo, local mosques offered prayers of sympathy. For the first time since its founding in 1949, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter, agreeing that the armed attack on one of its members “shall be considered an attack against them all.” With justice at our backs and the world by our side, we drove the