Fifteen years ago, as lower Manhattan burned with fear, anger and smoldering wreckage, President George W. Bush stood atop the pile of rubble and told a wounded New York, “The nation sends its love.” To chants of “God bless America,” the president looked out across the crowd and told them, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
To all listening, it was clear: the United States had been attacked, but in her grief and mourning, the nation, the people, would rally to the flag in unity. In the heat of that September a bond was forged, bringing us closer as Americans than we ever have been. When the enemy is at the gates we love those who man the walls beside us.
Fifteen years later, we are a nation broken. We have chased the men who knocked the buildings down to the ends of the Earth. We hunted Osama bin Laden across mountains and rivers and deserts and finally killed him, only to look back in horror at what we lost in the pursuit.
In the end, bin Laden faded like a memory and the nation, haunted by its mistakes and bereft of its enemy, broken by war and sacrifice and mistrust, collapsed under its own weight. Americans looked at those who stood beside them and no longer saw themselves in each other.
We are now in the midst of the most polarized presidential election in our history, and it is marked by the gap which divides Americans’ ideas of what our nation is and should be. Desperate Americans all over this country see the world changing and fear that the nation will leave them behind, that in the new landscape of the United States, they do not have a place. Young activists, who grew up surrounded by the failures of the Iraq War and a growing racial divide, have become disillusioned not only with the process of government, but with the nation itself, forsaking its symbols and its complicated and ugly history.
All across the country, new scars have formed and old wounds have reopened. Far from a nation brought together in love, we are divided by our ideas of what the nation should be.
There is no greater time to reflect on our national sickness than on the anniversary of 9/11, to remember the unity we displayed in the face of a ghostly enemy. The goal, however, is to love one another even when there is no enemy at the gates, even when we are not embattled.
The best and perhaps only way to do this is to embrace our country in all her ugliness and imperfection, to view the nation not as an ideal, but as a project. It is for this reason that recent protests, particularly by athletes on 9/11 itself, aimed at the national anthem or the American flag have misfired.
Historically, activists and leaders pushing for equality and freedom, like Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. have embraced the symbols of the United States, have used them to represent a challenge to us all to live up to the ideals they embody, which are that all men are created equal, that human beings can live in a free, pluralist and just society.
Love of country, even, if not especially, when we are deeply saddened and angered by the mistakes we have made, can bind us together when everything else seems to divide us. This is because when we drape ourselves in the flag, we are not black nor white, neither red nor blue. We are American, united in brotherhood and sisterhood. We are one nation in the bad times and in the good, when under siege and when safe in our beds, when standing on a pile of rubble and when looking back to see what we have built in its place.
Aaron Bondar is a sophomore double-majoring in economics and political science.