The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  This was the thing: abundance. Not only of food but of potential, of hope, of the kid from the project’s dream of being the next J. Lo, or West Point cadet or millionaire. Every middle-class kid in the suburbs thought it absolutely within his grasp to be the next Steven Spielberg or Russell Crowe, or to play Martin Sheen’s assistant on “The West Wing,” or to run the record industry or direct commercials.

  Abundant dreams. There was peace—crime down for the first time in a generation, the world relatively quiet, and in the suburbs they were starting to sleep with the windows open again. And material goods, things from the factory and the farm. As Kevin Spacey says in the commercial for his new movie, “Your produce alone has been worth the trip!”

  God, it was the age of abundance.

  Or maybe just: The Abundance.

  * * *

  I know people who are feeling a sense of betrayal at the big change, as if they thought history were a waiter in a crisp white jacket and though they ordered two more of the same, instead—instead!—he brought them, on a pretty silver platter, something quite dreadful.

  They feel betrayed because they thought what we have been living through the past four decades or so was “life.” But it wasn’t, it was “Superlife.”

  In the long ribbon of history life has been one long stained and tangled mess, full of famine, horror, war and disease. We must have thought we had it better because man had improved. But man doesn’t really “improve,” does he? Man is man. Human nature is human nature; the impulse to destroy coexists with the desire to build and create and make better. They’ve both been with us since the beginning. Man hasn’t improved, the weapons have improved.

  In the early 20th century the future was so bright they had to invent shades. They had everything—peace, prosperity, medical and scientific breakthroughs, political progress, fashion, glamour, harmless tasty scandals. The Gilded Age. And then all of a sudden they were hit by the most terrible war in all of European history, the most terrible plague in all of modern history (the Spanish flu) and on top of it all the most terrible political revolution in the history of man. And that was just the first 18 years.

  * * *

  People always think good news will continue. I guess it’s in our nature to think that whatever is around us while we’re here is what will continue until we’re not.

  And then things change, and you’re surprised. I guess surprise is in our nature, too. And then after the surprise we burrow down into ourselves and pull out what we need to survive, and go on, and endure.

  But there’s something else, and I am thinking of it.

  I knew for many years a handsome and intelligent woman of middle years who had everything anyone could dream of—home, children, good marriage, career, wealth. She was secure. And she and her husband had actually gotten these good things steadily, over 25 years of effort, and in that time they had suffered no serious reverses or illnesses, no tragedies or bankruptcies or dark stars. Each year was better than the previous.

  It was wonderful to see. But as I came to know her I realized that she didn’t think she had what she had because she was lucky, or blessed. She thought she had them because she was better. She had lived a responsible, effortful life; of course it had come together. She had what she had because she was good, and prudent.

  She deserved it. She was better than the messy people down the block.

  She forgot she was lucky and blessed.

  You forget you’re lucky when your luck is so consistent that it confounds the very idea of luck. You begin to think your good fortune couldn’t be luck, it must have been… talent. Or effort. Or superiority.

  The consistency of America’s luck may have fooled many of us into forgetting we were lucky to be born here, lucky to be living now, lucky to have hospitals and operas and a film industry and a good electrical system. We were born into it. We were lucky. We were blessed.

  We thought we were the heirs of John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, Mr. Levitt of Levittown. And we are. But still, every generation ya gotta earn it. It doesn’t mean you’re better; it means you’re lucky, and ya gotta earn it.

  * * *

  How did our luck turn bad, our blessings thin out?

  Great books will be written about that. But maybe from this point on we should acknowledge what we quietly know inside: It was a catastrophic systems failure, a catastrophic top-to-bottom failure of the systems on which we rely for safety and peace.

  Another way to say it: The people of the West were, the past 10 years or so, on an extended pleasure cruise, sailing blithely on smooth waters—but through an iceberg field. We thought those in charge of the ship, commanding it and steering it and seeing to its supplies, would—could—handle any problems. We paid our fare (that is, our taxes) and assumed the crew would keep us safe.

  We thought our luck would hold, too.

  The people—us, you and me, the sensuous man on the deck—spent a lot of time strolling along wondering What shall I pursue today, gold or romance? Romance or gold? I shall ponder this over a good merlot. We were not serious. We were not morally serious. We were not dark. We banished darkness.

  The American people knew, or at least those paying attention knew, that something terrible might happen. But they knew the government had probably done what governments do to protect us. The people did not demand this; the government did not do it. Bad men were allowed in; bad men flourished here, fit right in, planned their deeds. They brought more bad men in after them. They are here among us now; they send anthrax through the mail and watch our reaction, predicating their next move perhaps upon our response.

  Our intelligence system failed—but then for a quarter century we had been denying it resources, destroying its authority, dismantling its mystique. Our immigration system failed—but then in many ways it had been encouraged to fail. Our legal system failed.

  One of our greatest institutions, American journalism, failed. When the editors and publishers of our great magazines and networks want you to worry about something—child safety seats, the impact of air bags, drunk driving, insecticides on apples—they know how to make you worry. They know exactly how to capture your attention. Matthew Shepard and hate crimes, Rodney King and racism: The networks and great newspapers know how to hit Drive and go from zero to the American Consciousness in 60 seconds. And the networks can do it on free airwaves, a gift from our government.

  Did the networks and great newspapers make us worry about what we know we should have worried about? No. Did they bang the drums? No. Did they hit this story like they know how to hit a story? No.

  In January 2001 the Homeland Security report, which declared flatly that international terrorism would inevitably draw blood on American soil, was unveiled. They called a news conference in a huge Senate office building. Congressmen came, and a senator, Pat Roberts of Kansas. Only a half dozen reporters showed up, and one, from the greatest newspaper in the nation, walked out halfway through. It was boring.

  Every magazine and newspaper had, over the past 10 years, a front-page story and a cover on the madmen in the world and the weapons they could seize and get and fashion. But they never beat the drum, never insisted that this become a cause.

  Why? In part I think for the same reason our political figures didn’t do anything. It would have been bad for ratings. The people don’t want serious things at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, they want Sela Ward falling in love. I will never, ever forget the important Democrat who told me over lunch why Bill Clinton (president of the United States, January 1993 through January 2001) had never moved and would never move in a serious way to deal with the potential of nuclear and biological terrorism. Because it doesn’t show up in the polls, he said. Because it doesn’t show up in the focus groups.

  * * *

  It was a catastrophic systems failure, top to bottom. And we all share in it, some more than others.

  Except.

  Except those who did the remarkable things that day,
Sept. 11, 2001—the firemen who charged like the Light Brigade, the businessmen who said “Let’s roll.” Which is, in part, why we keep talking about them. To remind ourselves who we are in the midst of the systems failure. They did the right thing just by being what they were, which gave us inspiration just when we needed it most.

  And now we have to turn it all around.

  Great books, as I said, will be written about these days, and the war on which we are embarked, on how it began and why America slept, and what America did when it awoke. Much awaits to be learned and told.

  And what we must do now, in our anger and defensiveness, is support, assist and constructively criticize the systems that so catastrophically failed. For those systems still reign and we still need them. And they are trying to function now, and trying to protect us, with the same sense of loss we all share and the added burden of a mind-bending sense of remorse, frustration, anger and pain.

  * * *

  Where are we right now? We have reached the point in the story where the original trauma is wearing off (except in our dreams, where it’s newly inflicted), where expressions of solidarity and patriotism are true but tired, and questions about exactly how well our institutions are handling this—not in the past but right now—are rising.

  It all began 45 days ago. We know who did the bombings because they were on the planes, and they left receipts.

  But we do not know who their confederates here were, do not know who is spreading the anthrax that has hit Florida, New York and Washington, do not know the dimensions of the threat at home.

  Authority figures are doubted. The letter carriers don’t trust their superiors to take care of them, and how they feel is legitimate and understandable. The workers in the newsrooms, reassured by the boss that if they were going to get anthrax they would have had it by now, do not trust what they’re being told, or the tellers. And that is legitimate and understandable.

  We are reading anxious reports. Yesterday I read that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had admitted it kept nuclear plant vulnerability studies out and about and available for any citizen to see in their libraries. (Q: What were they thinking? A: They weren’t thinking; they were feeling, and what they were feeling was lucky.)

  More and more one senses we’re going to have to be taking as much responsibility for ourselves—and on ourselves—as we can. Doing our own research, taking our own actions, making our own decisions and acting on our guts.

  A week after Sept. 11 I was on a TV show where I said I’d been thinking about “Mrs. Miniver,” the 1942 movie with Greer Garson as the doughty British matron who saw her family—and thus her country—through the Blitz. I said that we were all going to have to be Mrs. Minivers now; we’re going to have to keep the home front going.

  I keep waiting for some talk show or news show to do the Mrs. Miniver segment, telling us what to do in case of real and terrible trouble.

  And no one is doing it.

  So we must all be doing it ourselves. I am researching and talking to experts. Next week I will talk about “How to Be Mr. and Mrs. Miniver”—from how much water to buy to where to put it and how to get everyone in your ambit together. I will share everything I’m told and hear. And let me tell you why I think, in all this mess, we must gather together and talk about how to get through it together, as citizens. Because our systems are not fully working yet.

  It’s a murky time. We’re all feeling a little bit lonely, and all of us at one moment or another have the existential willies. Those who have 13 kids and 34 grandchildren are feeling as alone as those who are actually all alone.

  We’d all best handle as much as we can ourselves, in and with our own little units.

  It may become a terrifically tough time. But we are not alone, as you well know. God loves faith and effort, and he loves love. He will help us get through this, and to enjoy Paris and New York again, and to breathe deep of his delicious, mansard-roofed world.

  Amen.

  Miracle on Fulton Street

  The el, the book party and the site of the Virgin.

  The Wall Street Journal: December 14, 2001

  My friends, this is the kind of column I used to do now and then before the world changed. I tell you what I’ve been doing and thinking and if you’re interested you get a cup of coffee and sit down and read along, and if you’re not you can go back to Opinion Journal’s main page, or Drudge, or Salon, or Free Republic.

  * * *

  It is Christmas in New York. The weather as you know has been soft, nice and not freezing but often overcast. A friend who comes into New York each week from Chicago told me yesterday that on Michigan Avenue it’s hustle and bustle and the world hasn’t changed at all, it’s Christmas, but on Madison Avenue it’s dead. It happens that I often walk along Madison Avenue and hadn’t noticed that, but there’s some truth in what he said. Our great high-end commercial avenue doesn’t have quite the cheery bustle of years past. But there’s more love on it, more flags and more friendliness in the shops, and at a big expensive handmade furniture place in the 80s they still have the pictures of every fireman who died on Sept. 11, each face highlighted in the middle of a paper star, all the stars filling the store’s main window. (In New York there has been a slight below-the-radar anti-fireman reaction to this kind of thing. Some people are tired of hearing the firemen praised, and they have a brother-in-law who’s a fireman who’s a worthless oaf who can’t even pick up his shorts. The other day an Internet executive told me this.

  I said: “Believe me, as soon as 343 Internet executives rush into a burning building and die so that strangers can live, I’m gonna drop the fireman like a rock and celebrate executives.”)

  * * *

  I have had a Christmas party week, a very social week. I am not an especially social person but it’s been a time for big gatherings, and I am grateful for it. In Brooklyn in my new neighborhood a house party in a grand brownstone mansion, thrown for the neighbors by a gentleman who in the ’80s and ’90s became rich. When I walked in I had the oddest sense of having been in this great home, or having been in a place very much like it, long ago. The huge rounded doorways, the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms and placement of the windows.

  I was born in Brooklyn half a century ago and not far from here, but in those days Brooklyn wasn’t rich. It was still full of the families Betty Smith wrote about in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” only two generations older than Francie, the schoolgirl in the book, and not impoverished but working class. We lived in an Irish and Italian ghetto that was turning African American and Puerto Rican. Living with our family were old aunts who’d been maids and cooks in Manhattan, and an uncle who was a carpenter. My grandmother was the coat attendant at a dance hall in Brooklyn called the Lenruth Room when I was a little girl, and I remember being there with her when I was a child, and seeing people dance and touching the coats.

  My grandparents lived in an apartment on Myrtle Avenue, in a walk-up on the fourth floor, and their bedroom faced the Myrtle Avenue el, which was about 10 feet outside their window. The whole apartment shook, literally shook, when the elevated trains came by. When I was with my grandparents I would put my arms on the windowsill like the old ladies of the neighborhood and watch the trains go by.

  I’ll tell you who else did this, a generation or two before. The actor Tony Curtis, who a few years ago wrote a wonderful memoir of his years as New York street urchin and Hollywood hellion. He told this story. As a boy he would sit each morning at the window of his parents’ apartment and watch the elevated trains. Every morning he’d see a man on the 8 a.m. train sitting in the same seat, wearing a brown hat and reading the Herald Tribune. The train would stop, young Tony would glance at the man and the man would glance at Tony. Then he’d go back to reading the paper and the train would roar off. One morning the train stops and the man isn’t in his seat. Next day he’s not there, next week. Then 10 days later he’s back in his same seat with the paper and the brown hat. And he glances o
ver at Tony and Tony glances at him. And for once they maintain their gaze. And the man lowers the paper and mouths, “I’ve been sick!” And the train roars off.

  I love that story. It’s a metaphor for how we know each other and don’t know each other, how we have relationships we don’t even remark upon and barely notice until they leave.

  Did I have a relationship with the house of the rich man whose home I was in this week? I didn’t see how I could, but I mentioned to the man’s friend, standing in his great hallway, that I had the oddest feeling of knowing this place even though there had been no mansions in our lives when I was a kid. The man said, “Oh, this wasn’t a mansion when you were a kid. He restored it to the way it was when it was first built. When you were a kid it was all broken up into 10 apartments. Regular people lived here.”

  So I could have been there before. And now I am here as an adult, as a person who writes of presidents, and the house is a mansion. Brooklyn is, has been, will ever be a place of miracles.

  * * *

  At a party in Manhattan, I spoke to a close aide to Rudy Giuliani, our king. He told me Rudy doesn’t want to leave until the fire’s out. Mr. Giuliani, of course, leaves as mayor in January, but his aide told me he is obsessed with putting out, as his final act, the infernal fires of Ground Zero, which still burn. Rudy wants the fires out by his last day as mayor. The city, the aide tells me, has been using satellite heat-finding imagery to pinpoint exactly where in the dead zone the fires are. “We find out where, we force foam in from one direction and the fire goes in another. We force foam in from the other direction and the fire goes up or down.”

  I asked him what, after three months, is still burning.

  “Computers,” he said.