Wasted on the Not-So-Young

Wasted on the Not-So-Young
America discovers mortality. It's about time.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, January 3, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

America rediscovered its mortality last fall, and as we embark upon the new year--a time for taking stock--the lamentations have been fierce. They have also been confusing, because there are two quite different sources of sorrow at work here. One is real, anchored in deep verities and deserving of profound respect. The other is dumb and dangerous. And they have been getting a bit too mixed up together.

What's real is the grief over Sept. 11. For this, it is entirely appropriate to mourn, to commemorate, to learn what we can and try to defeat the particular dangers of our time. We are sad for those who died. We are sad, as well, for ourselves--for our own mortality--foretold in the collapse of those high towers, underscored by the shocking speed with which death struck from a blue sky. It is both the horror of that day and the fate of all humanity we mourn for.

But then there are the lamentations that basically deplore the end of a spree in America of fantastically narcissistic juvenilia--summed up in the Clinton presidency, and too often mistaken in the 1990s for the far more forgivable state common to the genuinely young and known as youth. In media essays by folks who had presumably reached the age of majority years ago, I keep reading or hearing how sad it is that we can never again be young, never again bask in the bliss of total security, never again, in effect, stick our heads deep, deep in the sand and feel oh so OK about life.

To judge by some of the rhetoric, our world before last September was one long idyll, now all that innocence is kaput and we wander some blasted heath of the spirit, unable ever to return to those halcyon days in which we could kick back, tune in to "Temptation Island," or maybe the impeachment of Bill Clinton--whatever--and bask in how nothing and no one could ever be so serious as to truly threaten us.

A prime sample of this genre is Anna Quindlen's latest Newsweek column, in which she recalls jogging around the Twin Towers 25 years ago, and concludes that when she weeps now it is "for all of us who were so young once, in August, and will never feel that young again."

Whoa, let's back up just a second. Ms. Quindlen is talking about last August, and even then she wasn't all that young. If you do the math, it's been at least a quarter of a century since Ms. Quindlen could plead youth as an excuse for thinking all the world was one big happy jogging track. Surely by middle age most folks have learned more than that.

Or maybe not. America in the 1990s had the odd feel of a place where all that really mattered was to hang on to the sense of youth--ahh, carefree youth--at any cost. In 1997, after more than a decade of living abroad, I returned to this country and found myself wondering what had happened to middle age, or mortality, for that matter. So many people were so very busy being so very young. We had a president who behaved in the White House as if he were still in high school. We were cultivating a culture in which our individual well-being was pretty much someone else's responsibility. Even takeout coffee was supposed to be so idiot-proof hazard-free totally safe that no one should ever worry about any real danger--beyond, perhaps, getting hit with a lawsuit.

It was cool to make money without quite knowing why. It was cool to mobilize the military without quite addressing the dangers that really threatened us. We put more effort into rearranging Haiti than tracking down Osama bin Laden. We had a peace process in the Middle East that brought no peace; we had a "partnership" with China in which they stole our missile technology and we in effect told them we were all right with that. We had Mr. Clinton all wrapped in peace deals in Northern Ireland, while terrorists trained unrestrained in Afghanistan to assault our own shores. We had a lot of show over substance, and it was just not terribly grown up.

Not that youth doesn't have its splendors. But the more foolish aspects of youth are supposed to be wasted on the young, not flaunted as a signature lifestyle by those who lead us, nor stretched out into some peculiar state among adults of what is known these days as denial. In the recent nostalgia for the nursery-school inanities of the nineties, there has been an unfortunate tilt toward mistaking ignorance--or in some cases, gross self-indulgence--for innocence.

Dreams of eternal youth in a perfect world are of course nothing new to the human condition. And, sure, it's a tempting idea. But if you pay attention to the classic old tales, they rarely end well. The original Narcissus, he of the Greek myth, led an entirely vacuous life, staring into a pond, so enraptured by his own reflection that he finally just dried up into nothing--or maybe became a flower, depending on which version you favor. As some sort of national destiny, this was never a promising route.

As for mortality, it was not reinvented on Sept. 11. It was always out there, and the real lesson of 2001 is that ignoring terrible truths does not make them go away. Mortality is the one thing none of us can escape in the end, and for most of us it is hard to get far with any normal, individual adult life without bumping up against it. Our parents grow old; our friends start to die; we lose people we love, and for anyone who actually reads the papers or pays any attention to history, it had to be clear all along that the world is a dangerous place.

Had we paid closer attention to the warnings we got, had we faced up sooner to the usual matters of mortality, had we tolerated less pretending and demanded more defending from our leaders, Sept. 11 might never have happened. We can grieve that we are mortal, we can mourn for those who died. But, at least among adults, let's please stop mistaking the self-delusion that suffused the 1990s for a state of innocence and youth.

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."