ABSTRACT
From bumper stickers and billboards to political speeches and church sermons, few themes received more attention in post-9/11 America in the weeks immediately after the terrorist attacks than the need for national unity in the face of ominous external threats. “United We Stand” sufficed for the bumper stickers and T-shirts, but clerics, journalists, and academics expatiated on the theme of national unity at much greater length. Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin, for instance, declared, “One deep truth about September 11 is that a community was attacked, not an assortment of individuals.” Within this community, Gitlin further explained that in post-9/11 America, “You are in solidarity with strangers: their losses are your own.” This national solidarity summoned all Americans to “commonality and sacrifice,” expressed through a “patriotism of mutual aid, not just symbolic displays.” 1 In the same vein, the Episcopalian cleric Richard H. Downes saw in the tragic events of 9/11 a forceful reminder that “church and nation both require a strong sense of collective affirmation to bring out the meanings each embodies.” In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Americans needed again “to ponder who we are and how we are obligated to each other.” 2 Speaking in a similar tone, author and commentator George Packer identified 9/11 as an event exposing the fatuity of the divisive modern politics that have “balkanized” and “fragmented” American public life. Though he suspected that “That day changed America less than most people anticipated,” Packer nonetheless believed that 9/11 occasioned a shift in public mood, as Americans “looked at one another differently.” For the first time in many years, Americans again realized that “they were not merely individuals with private ends but rather fellow citizens, alive to the sentiments once expressed by the poet 2Walt Whitman: “‘What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?’” Because it made Americans newly cognizant of their ties to their fellow Americans, Packer asserted that 9/11 “made Americans think about change—not just as individuals, but as a country.” 3
