ABC's Jake Tapper makes the interesting point that most of the West Point cadets, in the audience for President Obama's Afghanistan speech last night, were ten years old when 9/11 happened (and, a reader notes that it's probably not "most, but rather, the first year cadets):
Our Jake Tapper made the interesting point this morning that many of the cadets in President Obama’s audience last night were 10 years old at the time of the 9/11 attacks that launched this country into war in Afghanistan. Have the echoes faded, making the war a harder sell?It might make 9/11 resonate less for them, but I'm not so convinced. I'll bet ten years old were scared to death on that day - they knew something was up, they saw mom and dad freaking out, they talked to their friends, they had the Internet and saw the video. If anything, children may have been even more scarred by the day than we adults were. ABC continues:
It’s debatable; only 7 percent in a CNN poll last August said “the country is completely back to normal,” indicating that 9/11 still does resonate. So do concerns about terrorism more broadly: In an AP poll last month 77 percent of Americans called terrorism an extremely or very important issue, about the same as when it asked in 2006; and in a CNN poll in October, 36 percent expressed concern they or a family member could be a victim, as many as said so in November 2001.I think we're finally getting over the political (and real) PTSD we all had, understandably, after the attack (I remember inexplicably breaking into tears when a waiter suddenly dropped a tray of plates behind me in a Paris restaurant a few years after September 11). A PTSD that the Bush administration was all too happy to exploit. We're not 100% there yet, but the day we are over September 11, I think it will be a good thing. You can remember the past, and learn from it, without having it so overwhelm your senses that its lessons are lost to passion.
