NEW YORK (AP) — Before the towers crumbled, before
the doomed people jumped and the smoke billowed and the planes hit, the
collective American memory summoned one fleeting fragment of beauty: a clear
blue sky.
So many of those who remember that day invoke that
detail. Last week, New York magazine, which has been running a 9/11
"encyclopedia" ahead of the 10th anniversary, added an entry for
"Blue: What everyone would remember first." It chronicled nearly a
dozen of the ways that Americans recalling 9/11 anchor their looks back with a
reminiscence of blue sky.
No coincidence that the power of such an image
endures. Blue sky is a canvas of possibility, and optimistic notions of better
tomorrows — futures that deliver endless promise — are fundamental to the
American tradition. In the United States, to "blue-sky" something can
mean visionary, fanciful thinking unbound by the weedy entanglements of the
moment. Off we go into the wild blue yonder.
But the years since 9/11 have dealt a gut punch to
four centuries of American optimism. A volley of cataclysmic events — two
far-off wars, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and, for the past four years,
serious economic downturn — has worn down the national psyche. It's easy to
ask: Is optimism, one of the defining pillars of the American character, on the
wane?
"Some of the really big challenges we are
facing are really starting to sink in with people," says Jason Seacat, who
teaches about the psychology of optimism and hope at Western New England
University. "You talk about that can-do spirit that used to exist, and it
still can exist. But what I get a lot of is, 'This is such a huge problem, and
there's really nothing I can do about it.'"
Welcome to the rest of the human race, some might
say. Europeans, who can enjoy their fatalism, have been known to poke fun at
American optimism. And why not? You could argue that the virus of optimism was
spread to this continent by supplicants beguiled by the vision of a land that
promised brighter futures — presuming you left the Old World to pursue them.
Since the 1600s, when one of America's first
Puritan leaders cast the society that would become the United States as a
"shining city upon a hill," the notion that one can will a better
future into existence has been a central thread of the American story. The
Declaration of Independence enshrined as national mythology not happiness
itself, but the pursuit of it — the chasing of a dream alongside life and
liberty as the ultimate expression of self-definition.
It took root. This became the nation where getting
bigger and better was a right granted by God, where the Optimists Club was
founded and "The Power of Positive Thinking" became a bestseller,
where you could bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun.
"Finish each day and be done with it," American writer Ralph Waldo
Emerson exhorted. "Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and
with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."
Old nonsense, alas, has a way of loitering around
and gumming up the works.
Last year, as we began a new decade, a Gallup poll
found that 34 percent of Americans were pessimistic about the country's future
- the highest number at the start of a decade since the 1980s began. Numbers
from Gallup's Economic Confidence Index late last month were the lowest since
March 2009. Most tellingly, perhaps, a majority of Americans — 55 percent —
said this year they found it unlikely that today's youth will have better lives
than their parents.
More anecdotally, when was the last time that
popular culture produced a strong vision of an optimistic American future? We
got those all the time in the mid-20th century, era of the World's Fair
"Futurama" and promises of jet-packing your way to the office in the
morning. But the Jetsonian view of tomorrow has become quaint, and today
forlorn narratives like "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," the zombie
apocalypse drama "The Walking Dead" and Cormac McCarthy's "The
Road" dominate the American futurescape.
In the weeks directly after 9/11, optimism seemed
on the rise for a time. The trumpet had summoned us again, and some people
expressed a renewed sense of purpose. A high-stakes seriousness settled in. We
spun tales of freshly minted heroes, gave blood, held benefits, told each other
that hey, don't worry, things will get better. A national coming together and
the accompanying resoluteness were, it seemed, feeding hope.
"In an odd way, for all its tragedy, 9/11
reinvigorated the sources of American optimism at a very particular time,"
says Peter J. Kastor, a historian at Washington University in St. Louis.
"The problem now is recapturing that."
Today, politicians struggle to project the
all-important optimistic outlook that will help them win elections and govern a
cranky citizenry. Yet optimism is a must-have narrative for any politician
looking to lead. And the most effective among them - the Roosevelts, John F.
Kennedy, Ronald Reagan - have built their images around optimism. "Morning
in America," Reagan called it.
Political consultant Bob Shrum, who wrote Ted
Kennedy's famous and optimistic speech at the 1980 Democratic National
Convention ("The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and
the dream shall never die"), says successful politicians deploy optimism
as a tool to "expand America's vision of itself." The ones who
endure, he says, "are people who help define and enlarge the American
spirit."
The "Audacity of Hope" president used the
meme Thursday night in his jobs speech to Congress after cataloguing employment
problems and putting forward his solutions. "We are tougher than the times
that we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been," Barack
Obama said. "So let's meet the moment. Let's get to work, and let's show
the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest
nation on Earth."
Not everyone finds salvation in positive thinking.
The cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an entire book in 2009 on the
country's excessive optimism. In "Bright-Sided: How the Relentless
Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," she assessed it
this way: "Positivity is not so much our condition or our mood as it is
part of our ideology — the way we explain the world and think we ought to
function within it."
Ehrenreich identified an important point: There is
a big difference between unfettered hope and the American brand of optimism.
Hope, she asserts, is an emotion; optimism is "a cognitive stance, a conscious
expectation."
And what, after all, is more American than a
conscious, supremely confident expectation that things will turn out OK? That
if we visualize the future, and are simply American enough as we forge forward,
bright tomorrows will happen.
That may be the central challenge for American
optimism at the dawn of the second decade after 9/11: figuring out how much of
the dream should be about the clear blue sky, and how much should be about
wrestling with the problems that percolate beneath it. A balance, in effect,
between the promise of our tomorrows and the reality of our todays.
It's not like the future is going anywhere, though.
It's been our comforting companion for too long, and blue-sky dreams have a way
of clawing to the top of any American story. Even after 9/11 and the uneasy
decade that followed it tested the optimism of so many, that's the thing about
tomorrow: No matter what, it's still always a day away.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/ ETA (Top), Daniel Hulshizer(Bottom))
