Pondering 9/11: Date brings healing, division

A time to reflect? Re-invent ourselves? Make a political statement? Three years after the awful, watershed morning of Sept. 11, Utahns are faced with an anniversary that turns out to be conflicted as well as cathartic.

For some, today's observances will be a time of quiet prayer. For others it's a day not only to honor those killed in the World Trade Center, Pentagon and the four doomed airplanes but to honor the soldiers killed since then in Iraq. For still others, it's a day to argue that the tragedy has been used to fight what they consider an unjust war and to curtail liberties at home.

Sept. 11 is, for some, part of the collective psyche — as a new Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll shows — but that doesn't mean the date ends up signifying the same thing to all or that everyone has learned the same lessons from it. Liberals and conservatives, for example, tend to have a different take on what the attacks taught us.

Sept. 11 "raised the importance of people feeling more secure," says Utahn Richard Wirthlin, former chief strategist for President Ronald Reagan and author of a new biography of the late president.

Former University of Utah political science professor Ted Wilson says the day raises another question: "It's a day to be wary of those who hate us," he says, "and to ask that big, huge question: 'Why do they hate us?' and to hopefully answer that in meaningful ways."

The Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll, conducted this week by Dan Jones & Associates, finds that three years after the attacks nearly half of Utahns questioned (46 percent) say they are "more courteous and friendly to strangers" than they were before Sept. 11, 2001; 43 percent say they have made more emergency preparations; 36 percent are thinking about their own mortality more than before; and 35 percent are more concerned about traveling on airplanes. More than four out of five Utahns polled (82 percent) say they have a "deeper sense of patriotism" now, but that's down from 92 percent in a poll taken in October 2001.

Only 16 percent said that their anxiety levels are higher now than they were three years ago today.

One of the more unusual commemorations in Utah today is called "Rants and Laments," featuring "cow mantras, burka dancers, acts of language and mortar shell gongs."