Journalist Claudia Rosett, taking a break from exposing massive corruption at the U.N., says it's time to stop and smell the cherry blossoms, despite all the challenges we face.
[T]his spring, more than 3 1/2 years after Sept. 11, it does seem that since that day America has weathered a rough passage awfully well. That, and with the cherry trees just done blooming in Washington and New York's Central Park full of flowers (and, in the grand old tradition, amateur baseball teams), it feels worth a moment to stand back and observe that for all the usual ructions of politics and the more prominent idiocies of such institutions as Hollywood, academia and the imploding United Nations in our midst, rarely in recent decades has there been more sanity and self-respect abroad in this land.Posted by Alan at May 4, 2005 06:25 AMIt gets hard even to remember at this point, but less than five years ago, in what feels like another age of the world--and perhaps it was--the talk of America was whether our future as a democracy hung on the swinging chads of the Florida election recount. Some doubted that the republic could survive this experience unmaimed. Along with that, the dot-com bubble burst. The recession into which the country had already begun sliding got worse. Then came the Sept. 11 attacks that scorched the Pentagon and leveled the Twin Towers. And as America picked itself up from these acts of war, there were lamentations not only for those who died, but for the loss of American innocence.
It was not in truth innocence that had been lost. America, like any free nation, depends on a system of trust, engendered by liberty and rule of law. This accounted for the spell of almost odd gentility with which we treated each other in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. And it accounts for the resolve that we have by and large discovered since. What we lost was a crippling naiveté, cultivated in the narcissistic 1990s. What we regained was pride in our country, and a revived appreciation both of the values that have made America great, and the need--even at high cost, or in the face of such stuff as U.N. disapproval--to defend them.