On the March

Days after the attack on the World Trade Center, I traveled from Tulsa to New York City. I had spoken about the assault over the High Holidays at our synagogue and remember feeling a sense of foreboding. I had written a lament for those who were killed in the attack and the same for those who were murdered at the Pentagon. Our son had just set out for college in Boston and the world felt that it was turning backwards on its axis. It was impossible to reckon with the maelstrom of my fears.

My greatest fear is that we would see immediate shifts in our society. I could feel the rising animus toward Muslims, and spoke against stereotyping in many public settings. I also worried about a rush to security, the locking down of a society now obsessed with safety. There’s a paragraph in one of the sermons I gave all about the allure of a national identity card which would allow the government to monitor and surveil us. As a privacy fetishist, I found the prospect loathsome.

Many of my fears have now been realized. Anti-Muslim prejudice is now stronger than ever, at least according to the new numbers: a 7.4% increase since 2023. Why Muslims in Michigan put their faith in Donald Trump is a phenomenon we will be talking about for decades. And we are finally making “progress” toward a national ID card. In a matter of weeks, it will be impossible to travel by air without the new driver’s license I have in my pocket. It looks like a license, but it’s really not. It’s part of a national program called Real ID. As if the assault on privacy was insufficient, we are now chipped and tagged as never before.

You could have seen all of this coming way back then, but bad things sometimes take a while to arrive. Along with everything else, I remember 2001 as a period of suspended animation. In the immediate aftermath, the airports were largely unchanged. It took months for the apparatus of security to take shape. For a while it was just a guy with a rifle. Then came the lines, the searches, the machinery of detection. I am unreasonably sensitive to such shifts in tone, but perhaps you’re the kind of person who feels it, too.

Now, of course, I feel greater foreboding. Our president abominates nervy judges who dare to confound his latest plans. How soon will this be followed by the dismantling of the judiciary? He detests the norms of free speech on campus and has recalled millions of dollars that fund research and innovation. How long before compliant administrators turn the universities of the country into centers of obedience? Donald Trump can’t abide the occasional news organization which questions the naming decisions of the new administration. How long will they be permitted to ask questions at all without triggering the impulse to muzzle and suppress?

If you’re like me, you see all of this coming. I detest the sense that it’s about to happen, but at this point I fear that the die has been cast.