Brad Olson: After Sept. 11, remembering not to forget skepticism

Once upon a time, we were the sons and daughters of the baby boomer misfits, the generation most likely to do anything or nothing, branded amorphously, but maybe with a tinge of pornography, as the X generation.

Now, our essence has been beat upon with horror and tragedy, enough to subsume our apathy and replace it with grief and earnestness.

Brooding behind this transformation, there was another, one which would have been more important to our new Americana. Instead of measuring the government, and the American institution, with disdain or at least with wariness, we were beginning to rely on it, and to trust it. For a few moments, nothing else could offer any solace.

But for good cause, let us not forget our caution and skepticism. Beginning in the '60s and '70s, from every direction, Americans found their most fundamental assumptions under assault. The civil rights movement challenged the image of America as history's formidable champion of liberty. Vietnam cast doubt on our mission as freedom's executor around the world. Watergate undermined Americans' faith in presidential power and the government, in general. Stagflation, coupled with the clamoring of environmental groups, threw the virtues of economic growth and the promise of capitalism into question. America lost much of its innocence.

Whether and how much this doubt dissipated over the succeeding 20 years is uncertain, but for people like my father, it was not nearly so bad lately as it was then. Even during President Clinton's tenure, a time riddled with lies and scandal, we seemed to be in the heyday of prosperity. There may have been distrust, but at least the economy was thriving.

At first glance, Sept. 11 seemed to obliterate our sense of safety, which is probably the most important need or right we have. But after some amount of time, I saw great potential in the outpouring of patriotism across the country. I hoped that trust in our government, the economy and each other could be restored.

Before the Enron collapse became America's most prevalent concern, this had largely come to pass. The Taliban made outlandish claims about civilian casualties, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld balked. Reporters laughed. We laughed. The economy was on its way out of recession after only one quarter of negative growth. Employment was picking up again.

And then the stories started to pour out. 27 detainees were wrongly accused at Guantanamo Bay. In the Enron debacle, thousands lost their retirement savings. Thousands, not hundreds, of Afghans were killed by American bombing. Executives cashed in their stocks while employees could not. Clusters of al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners escaped from capture at a Pakistani airlift. A business near the pinnacle of Fortune's 500 was actually teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.

All of this should only remind us that we cannot expect to be told the truth by those in power. It would be naive. But even sadder is our failure to learn from it.

My father read to me until I was probably 10 or 11 years old. Oddly enough, most of the books he read at my bedside dealt with the Holocaust. There was The Diary of Anne Frank, of course, but there were others -- children's books, soldier's books, memoirs, everything. I never quite understood why he read me so many, except now to guess that it was part of his great hope that I would never be a stooge to something so atrocious.

In less extreme cases, such issues extend to everything we do and everywhere we are. I often return to the questions, "would I walk away?" and "would I blow the whistle?"

Recently, there was an "incident" involving a sorority on our campus. No one is really saying anything about what happened. Only those involved really know.

Their silence may be a matter of loyalty to a pledge and the "honor" of those who made it, but if what happened was disgraceful or wrong, then silence can only be dishonorable.

It is easy to slander Jeffrey Skilling and his Enron cronies because of their cowardice and greed, but it is only hypocritical if our own backbones break in the face of moral quandaries. We are not acquitted of the demands of ethics and truth, and unfortunately, though we vilify the dastardly Enronites and the occasionally tragic ineptitude of our armed forces far, far away from our university, our consciences may not be as clean as we wish they were.

Brad Olson is a senior History major from Huntsville, Texas.

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