Not Guilty

Not Guilty
They say we've lost our innocence. They're wrong.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, September 20, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

We keep hearing that America has lost its innocence. But I'm not so sure. We have lost thousands of lives, and two tall towers, and for now we have lost what was always an unrealistic sense that in this post-Cold War era we are safe from sudden brutal attack spawned in far-off lands. As I write this, the reek of destruction is still wafting across Manhattan, a metallic smell of ash on a cool evening breeze. A reminder that we have lost plenty.

But when we speak of American innocence, what comes to my mind is something much bigger than a naiveté now fled. I think we are talking about a kind of open-hearted trust, a society that for all its quirks remains perhaps the least corrupt on earth. And if we speak of American innocence in that finest sense of the word--of civility and trust--what stands out is how very much we have not lost.

That's not a statement of defiance, nor is it yet another example of American naiveté. It is simply fact. What sets the people of this country apart from so many stricken by atrocities--in troubled nations such as China and Russia, or in rogue states that despise us--is that Americans at core trust their countrymen. And when we rally around our government, it is not in fear, or with the blind anger of mob response. We look to our leaders with the conviction that we have chosen them to honor our needs. During these past 10 days, the shift in references, even on late-night TV discourse, from "W" to "President Bush" has been a mark not only of his own actions, but of our self respect.

This trust in each other has been clear not only in the flourishing of flags and the making of public speeches, but in the desire of Americans to help each other, and the need to grieve for people most of us have never met. In moments of crisis, a person's true nature tends to show through; the same holds for societies. New York is famous for its hard-boiled ways--I keep remembering a routine morning about three years ago, when I rode a crowded subway to the World Trade Center, and as we all piled off, an old man gestured at the throng and said to no one in particular, "All these people, and no human beings!" It was a classic New York wisecrack. But faced with disaster, New York has revealed itself as a city filled with human beings, some of whom died trying to help others. Across America right now, we are angry at our enemies, but almost unnervingly gentle toward each other, because we feel so keenly the value of human life.

To Americans, such fellowship might seem the normal order of the universe. Would that it were. At the simplest level, I keep thinking of another disaster not so long ago, in which 118 people died deaths terrible to imagine: the sinking last year of a Russian submarine, the Kursk. Russia's President Viadimir Putin did not immediately rouse the world to help. He didn't even rush to tell his own countrymen about the accident. While 23 submariners who survived the initial wreck suffocated at the bottom of the Barents Sea, he continued his vacation. What a contrast to the scene from the first instant in lower Manhattan.

Singling out Mr. Putin would not be fair. He leads a Russia that compared with Soviet times is an almost benevolent land. His instinctive indifference to the Kursk pales next to the cruelties of such creatures as Stalin, who presided actively over the deaths of more than 20 million Russians, or of Mao, whose dictates meant the deaths of some 30 million Chinese.

To bring this more up to date, America's experience last week was terrible, but not crippling to the soul as are such awful betrayals as took place in China, in 1989, when the government turned its guns on its own people. Other reports of true loss of innocence pour almost daily over the wires, in the form of such stuff as more Falun Gong practitioners tortured to death in Chinese police custody--a hideous, unjust end that evokes no official statements of horror at the deed, no public comfort for the families. Chinese citizens who show concern for the innocents thus rubbed out risk being not thanked and embraced on national television, but arrested, tortured or even murdered themselves.

Why the difference? Americans are no more intrinsically virtuous than Russians, or Arabs, or Chinese or any other group on the planet. What does make us different is that we enjoy a system of free markets and democracy in which almost everyone--to get ahead--has incentives to contribute to the common good. Even the most selfish and bigoted among us stand to profit by supplying something that others value. We grow up bathed in evidence that even people we don't like may have much to offer that we prize. And, especially in times of trouble, this makes it a lot easier to love each other.

By contrast, under unfree systems--such as the communist state of the former Soviet Union--the main way to get anywhere in life was to take. You prospered by stealing from the state, you survived by informing on your neighbor, you learned to respect few and trust no one. Yes, that system collapsed in Russia, and the Cold War it engendered is over. But the collateral damage of that era is vast. Not only Russia but China and all of Central Asia are still deeply ill with the effects. Add to that such cauldrons of brutality as Iraq, Sudan or, say, Syria--where in Hama, the city in which the government in 1982 massacred thousands of its own people, there is no memorial at all.

These are realms truly bereft of innocence. And America still stands worlds apart.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."