The Audacity of Hope

regarding the moral obligations we owed to Somalis, Haitians, Bosnians, or other
unlucky souls.
Then came September 11—and Americans felt their world turned upside down.
IN JANUARY 2006, I boarded a C-130 military cargo plane and took off for my first
trip into Iraq. Two of my colleagues on the trip—Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana and
Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee—had made the trip before, and they
warned me that the landings in Baghdad could be a bit uncomfortable: To evade
potential hostile fire, military flights in and out of Iraq’s capital city engaged in a series
of sometimes stomach-turning maneuvers. As our plane cruised through the hazy
morning, though, it was hard to feel concerned. Strapped into canvas seats, most of my
fellow passengers had fallen asleep, their heads bobbing against the orange webbing
that ran down the center of the fuselage. One of the crew appeared to be playing a video
game; another placidly thumbed through our flight plans.
It had been four and a half years since I’d first heard reports of a plane hitting the World
Trade Center. I had been in Chicago at the time, driving to a state legislative hearing
downtown. The reports on my car radio were sketchy, and I assumed that there must
have been an accident, a small prop plane perhaps veering off course. By the time I
arrived at my meeting, the second plane had already hit, and we were told to evacuate
the State of Illinois Building. Up and down the streets, people gathered, staring at the
sky and at the Sears Tower. Later, in my law office, a group of us sat motionless as the
nightmare images unfolded across the TV screen—a plane, dark as a shadow, vanishing
into glass and steel; men and women clinging to windowsills, then letting go; the shouts
and sobs from below and finally the rolling clouds of dust blotting out the sun.
I spent the next several weeks as most Americans did—calling friends in New York and
D.C., sending donations, listening to the President’s speech, mourning the dead. And for
me, as for most of us, the effect of September 11 felt profoundly personal. It wasn’t just
the magnitude of the destruction that affected me, or the memories of the five years I’d
spent in New York—memories of streets and sights now reduced to rubble. Rather, it
was the intimacy of imagining those ordinary acts that 9/11’s victims must have
performed in the hours before they were killed, the daily routines that constitute life in
our modern world—the boarding of a plane, the jostling as we exit a commuter train,
grabbing coffee and the morning paper at a newsstand, making small talk on the
elevator. For most Americans, such routines represented a victory of order over chaos,
the concrete expression of our belief that so long as we exercised, wore seat belts, had a
job with benefits, and avoided certain neighborhoods, our safety was ensured, our
families protected.
Now chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act
differently, understand the world differently. We would have to answer the call of a
nation. Within a week of the attacks, I watched the Senate vote 98–0 and the House vote
420–1 to give the President the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force
against those nations, organizations or persons” behind the attacks. Interest in the armed
services and applications to join the CIA soared, as young people across America
resolved to serve their country. Nor were we alone. In Paris, Le Monde ran the banner