Peter Wood

The season is almost upon us of lachrymose memorials to the victims of 9/11. As a nation we choke each year as the anniversary approaches. We can talk about the heroic firefighters and cops, those first-responders who that day sometimes made their last response. We can recount the lists of the dead and the daring of some survivors. A great many Americans remember in vivid detail how the horrors of that day intersected their own lives. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what 9/11 meant and still means to the nation. Even in this age of declining historical literacy, we have a ready sense of the defining importance of more remote occurrences: Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, D-Day. These days, we should add 1619, Wounded Knee and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.

Following the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, a fair number of elected leaders — mostly Democrats — and law enforcement officials expressed their belief that an armed insurrection was in the works. Hostile forces were said to ready to attack Washington intent on overthrowing the government. To forestall this, fences topped with razor wire were installed and members of the National Guard were kept on active duty. March 4 was rumored to be the date set for this uprising. No army of insurrectionists appeared on March 4 or any other date. Nor as far as anyone can tell was there ever a prospect for such an attack. On March 1, the razor wire was removed from one of the tall fences, but reinstalled on a shorter fence across the street, closer to the Capitol.

America is no longer just angry. We have become a nation of wrath. It is a risky emotional condition, recognizable by our desire to obliterate our opponents. Wrath doesn’t seek reconciliation. It wants revenge. Nor does wrath want to accommodate what it can’t control. It wants to rub the slate clean. There is a wrathfulness of the political left, stemming from visceral hatred of Trump and his supporters. But as the left is ascendant in the seats of power, it can pursue its effort to extinguish its opposition via the instruments of state. The wrathfulness on the political right is another story. Wrath reaches its zenith when people feel not just abused but hopeless in the pursuit of any redress.

President Biden has stirred some controversy in recent days by his apparent preference for the word 'equity' over the word 'equality' in dealing with social issues. Most notably he issued an executive order on housing on January 26, framed as a step toward realizing his 'agenda for advancing racial equity’. The White House 'Fact Sheet' mentions 'equity' 11 times, and 'equality' not at all. In his 'Remarks by President Biden at Signing of an Executive Order on Racial Equity,' the President employed 'equity' 10 times, stumbling once where he began to say 'equal…' Elsewhere, Vice President Harris has helpfully explained, 'There’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, "Oh, everyone should get the same amount.

‘Do you think he died of dispossession?’ That’s the facetious question the nameless hero of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, asks the audience at a rally in New York City in the 1930s. He is a smart and ambitious but naive young man who has fallen into the hands of a radical faction — no doubt the American Communist party — who want to use him to stir up black activism in Harlem. The audience warms to him as he admits his incompetence and compares the microphone to the ‘steel skull of a man’. Echoing his Marxist tutors, he asks, ‘Do you think he died of dispossession?’ I read the passage and think of the elusive charmer — ‘If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black’ — President Joe Biden.

Reparations are a recipe for rancor. Under the guise of settling a grievance, they intensify and often eternalize it. They almost inevitably plant seeds of enmity that last for generations. However large the cost, the victorious side eventually feels it settled too cheap. And the side that humbly paid comes to recognize it paid too dearly and gained nothing more than a pause in the demands. Reparations don’t repair. They turn the original grievance into institutionalized animosity. The topic comes up because today’s doyen of racial resentment, the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, says that monetary reparations are ‘What Is Owed’ to black Americans for centuries of slavery and ‘slavocracy’.

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.   The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov.