I spent the afternoon of September 11, 2011 remembering September 11, 2001, in the company of thousands attending the Minnesota Remembers program in Eden Prairie. Governor Mark Dayton, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Commissioner of Public Safety Mona Dohman spoke about the courage and service of our community’s first responders. Fire service, emergency medical service, and law enforcement leaders spoke with passion and clarity about the excellence of their people, and the need for continued public support. All who gathered remembered and reflected, together. It was a genuinely excellent program, thoughtfully planned and poignantly executed. I was moved.
As we reflected on our past, I was struck by thoughts for our future. First, let it not go without saying: the people who help us to be safe, and who aid us when we are in trouble, are worthy of our respect, gratitude, and support. By their and others’ efforts, we have become safer in the last ten years: fortifying, becoming more vigilant, imagining and deterring future threats. We have invested to prevent and to prepare for violent acts, which a decade ago seemed too remote to warrant that investment. Our work is not done.
Second, the events of 9/11 and its aftermath reflect both the darkest and the brightest aspects of humanity. As Pastor Dan Carlson of Public Safety Ministries reminded us in his brilliant (and, I was grateful to note, truly non-denominational) benediction, no group has a monopoly on either darkness or the light. We are all capable of kindness as well as cruelty, of ennobling wisdom as well as dangerous foolishness. We can connect, and we can alienate. The defining moments we commemorate revealed much about our very humanity: we are at once strong and vulnerable.
Our vulnerabilities encompass not only physical violence but moral risk, as well. We have heard again and again that our nation is a bastion of freedom and tolerance, and for that reason, we were attacked. I have come to believe that our future must include greater efforts to understand one another in ways that diminish the hatred and alienation that motivated such attacks.
We must also commit to defend our values along with our safety. Too often in our responses, we have weakened the very values which we purport to defend. We have been less than judicious in protecting privacy and liberty in the face of remote or imagined threats. We have also stooped to xenophobia. According to the New York Times, in the past year more than two dozen states have considered laws preventing judges from consulting Islamic law in deciding cases. Is this really a pressing threat to jurisprudence, or a jingoistic red herring? I attended a conference last year wherein a vendor sold t-shirts stating, “Everything I need to know about Islam I learned on 9/11.” Conference organizers compelled him to stop selling the unauthorized merchandise, but what of the buyers? We have much work to do.
Let us spend the next decade improving how we protect and express the values that have made ours a great nation. Let us seek to connect across barriers, with the same creativity and zeal with which we erect protective barriers. Let us remember: our vulnerability, our strength, our character, and our humanity.
