On September 11, 2001, I got a strange phone call from my daughter Amity. Something very scary had happened, she told me. An airplane had crashed into a big NYC building.
The rest of that day, as the news got stranger and scarier, our own lives were jolted out of their normal pattern. Afraid that some nut might target MIT, I drove down there and fetched home both Frank and our sophomore daughter Mira. My next anti-disaster activity was organizing a big super-family dinner for that night, to include also Zoe VanderWolk and three of her fellow Harvard freshmen.
We didn’t talk much about the World Trade Center news over dinner. None of us really had any wise things to say. In retrospect, the implicit Wilczek position was that in time of disaster you grab your family, reach out to others you love, and find some useful, preoccupying work.*
For weeks afterward, the country drew together. Even the usual noisy Cambridge drivers stopped blowing loud horns at pedestrians and one another.
Now, four years later, we’re fresh from a different national disaster, Hurricane Katrina. This one has divided our nation instead of uniting us.
We can’t blame Al Qaida for the misery and chaos in New Orleans–or the many extra deaths when expected help arrived too late. Democrats blame FEMA, which congratulated itself only last year on the great success of its hurricane-readiness activities in New Orleans. Republicans blame local governments, which acted too slowly and then failed to use all the proper phrasings and secret handshakes when asking for federal help.
If we all agree that our own government failed miserably to keep US citizens safe, then is the solution to keep cutting taxes and starving government agencies, as Republicans hope? They seem to be dealing with the political storm much more successfully than with Hurricane Katrina. If catastrophe should hit your town or mine, I really, really hope they don’t win this one.
* Also, both then and now, use Amazon to send money to the Red Cross.