Posted on 12/01/2001 3:14:09 PM PST by Pokey78
Women noticed it first. The cultural shift in the United States in the past two months has been subtle, but it has also been deep. The yawning class divide of the 1990s has narrowed culturally in the wake of September 11. I know of no better anecdote to describe this than one that the Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, told a short time after the massacre. “On Friday, September 14, I went with friends down to the staging area on the West Side Highway where all the trucks filled with guys coming off a 12-hour shift at ground zero would pass by,” she wrote. “They were tough, rough men, the grunts of the city — construction and electrical workers and cops and emergency medical workers and firemen. “All we did was cheer . . . And suddenly I looked around me at all of us who were cheering and saw who we were. Investment bankers! Orthodontists! Magazine editors! We had been the kings and queens of the city, respected professionals in a city that respects its professional class. And this night we were nobody. We were so useless, all we could do was applaud the somebodies, the workers who, unlike us, had not been applauded much in their lives. And now they were saving our city.” If there was one profound social crisis in America during the most recent, elysian fin de siècle, it was the plight of the American working class. As the global economy displaced many out of well-paid manual jobs, as immigrants competed to drive down wages, as the gap between rich and poor widened until it was impossible to see one side from the other, you could feel the tension beneath the surface. Last summer I wrote in this space about an epic battle in the Hamptons, New York’s summer resort, between a spoilt Manhattan socialite who had injured some locals in a car accident. She had contemptuously referred to her victims as “white trash”. The clash and the court case seemed emblematic of an unbridgeable social divide — of money, taste, class, lifestyle — and it was epitomised in New York City. This division was only made worse by the collapse of the institutions that once gave life and meaning to working-class America — the unions and the old Democratic party. In the last election the Democrats became the party of some working-class Americans, but more definitively of the new Labour crowd — upper and upper-middle-class urbanites, the more embittered of the racial minorities, feminists, service-industry millionaires and their prosperous employees. Not only did the working class get the shaft in some respects, they were also left with a feeling of cultural pointlessness. All the social prestige was reserved for internet pioneers, biotechnology geeks, media stars, celebrity sportsmen, lawyers, journalists and other lucky members of the intellectual and social upper crust. And not only did the troops of manual workers, cops, firefighters, government workers, coalminers and oil extractors get the short straw in terms of social prestige, they were also regularly derided as bigots, sexists, xenophobes, homophobes . . . It would be an exaggeration to say that this has changed profoundly. The events of September 11 haven’t undone the global economy, the importance of technology and intellectual skills, the disparity between rich and poor. But they have decisively changed the mood. Suddenly it seems as though the masses who toil in under-appreciated jobs have something not merely worthwhile but important to contribute. Each day The New York Times publishes a score of small obituaries of the murdered in the WTC: the firefighters, the secretaries, the janitors, the clerical staff. In the face of this, the yuppies, internet entrepreneurs, Starbucks drinkers and marketing executives have been forced into a kind of humility that feels as much like a purge of past excess as a reminder of present solidarity. This is not to indict capitalism or its extraordinary successes of the past two decades. Nor is it to say that there is any easy way to remove the inevitable disparities between rich and poor in a vibrant and mobile society. But it is to say that Americans have been reminded that economic inequality need not always mean the condescension or mutual incomprehension that has been prevalent in the recent past. The best expression of this social solidarity came, to my mind, from a cartoonist — Scott Adams, the creator of the character Dilbert: an ordinary man, a cog in the corporate wheel, suffering daily indignities with humour and resilience. In his Dilbert newsletter, Adams wrote: “I’ve written and rewritten this section a dozen times. My problem is that no matter how much I write, I keep condensing it down to the same thought: this holiday season, as we laugh and eat and shop and enjoy friends and family, our soldiers are in Afghanistan risking everything for us. “Some of them won’t come back. The rest will never be the same. Every one of them volunteered. They think we’re worth it. Let’s prove them right.” In the new mood of wartime civil equality, many Americans are now trying to do just that.
Can't be said any better!
The Ravens caps are moving slowly, compared to the caps with the NYPD and NYFD logo. Wonderful.
I'm sure firemen "shift" Andrew Sullivan, too...
This is what I like about jounalists like Sullivan. This country is on the right path when people of influence take notice of the quiet virtue in ordinary people. Our Founders wrote a Consitution based on it. Alexis de Tocqueville pointed it out to us. And men like Ronald Reagan exemplified it. Every once in a while it is good to get back to square one.
She was no socialite. She was a monied vulgarian.
No big thing - a white collar job at the post office - but the neighbors inquire.
They come from 35 countries. They belong to every religion. They are of every color. Most have been refugees themselves at some time in their lives - fleeing from a wartorn city or village. We even have a handful who were child soldiers!
They stop by to inquire.
It's not for me, but for my fellows who really did and contiue to face death handling and delivering mail. Truly something to think about.
Scott Adams' 'Dilbert Newsletter' is something I'd recommend as well. He's smart, perceptive, and has his priorities straight. No wonder socialists hate him so much.
The other thing was an article recently about long-haul truckers, and how they are keeping an eye on the highways and byways of the country, not reporting to each other the whereabouts of "Smokies" lest a terrorist be listening.
Ordinary people who've never been to NYC, probably will never go there, nonetheless feel a strong kinship with the citizens of NYC, and grieved for them. And ordinary workers without anyone asking, are doing what they can to help keep America, all of us, safe.
That's what the terrorists have done: they've reminded us that we're all, first of all, Americans; people with something very, very precious. And we're all ready to do our bit to protect these precious freedoms.
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