One of the challenges in publishing a quarterly magazine is trying to anticipate what’s going to be on readers’ minds three to six months down the line. But the grim drama of September 11 gave new meaning to the term “overtaken by events.” With the issue you hold in your hands three weeks away from the printer and deep into editing, the staff at CommonWealth and its parent organization, MassINC, kept company with a horrified nation, spending the day with eyes glued to the television set, watching our world change forever.

At this writing, the storm clouds of war are gathering over Afghanistan, the economy seems to have tipped into what must be history’s first airline-led recession, and the nation remains grief-stricken. But the shock waves that continue to spread from the place we have now come to call Ground Zero are not only physical and psychic; they are also civic.

The first expressions of public catharsis were spontaneous. Suddenly flags and the strains of “God Bless America” were everywhere, as were candlelight vigils that ranged from loose gatherings on street corners to hastily called events on town commons and high-school football fields.

“Events of great tragedy, events of great adversity, almost across the board bring out great humanity,” says Thomas Sander, executive director of the Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America, a research-and-discussion project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The question, he says, from a civic perspective is, “How can we sustain what’s been awakened by all this?”

What will–and should–come next is hard to know. There is, in fact, no true precedent, as sheltered as Americans have been from the rage of zealots who think they can advance their cause by taking civilian lives. The first attempt to take down the World Trade Center, in 1993, had, it seems in retrospect, all too little effect on the public consciousness. So the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 may be the closest precursor. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building by truck bomb killed 168 men, women, and, most disturbingly, children. What followed the shock was an outpouring of generosity nationally and civic energy locally.

“Money just came from the sky,” says Nancy Anthony, executive director of the Oklahoma City Community Foundation. “People ask me about the money we raised here, and I say we didn’t raise any money. We just went to the post office.” Ultimately, some $40 million in donations flowed into the grieving city, much of it directed toward relief agencies like the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army, but no small portion of it showing up in checks mailed to the mayor’s office, no strings attached. A similar opening of wallets on an appropriately grander scale has already been seen since September 11. A celebrity telethon raised $150 million in a single evening, and the LibertyUnites.org Web site, sponsored by a consortium of Internet-related companies, collected $88.5 million online for a range of disaster-relief and survivor funds within two weeks of the tragedy.

Oklahoma City’s surge of civic activism helped the traumatized city clean itself up, comfort the afflicted, and rebuild. “Volunteerism certainly did go up,” says Bob Spinks, president of the United Way of Metro Oklahoma City.”It was a matter of people wanting to help, almost frustrated there wasn’t more they could do.”

The wave of direct-service involvement subsided after a year or two, but civic energies continued to pour into building a memorial to the victims, and to downtown revival projects that were already on the drawing board but given new life, according to Anthony. “Pride energized the whole thing,” she says. “One successful effort breeds another one.”

But there are warning signs to be noted in the Oklahoma City saga. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the community was so absorbed with disaster relief that “it made it really challenging to raise money for anything [else],” says Spinks; the United Way campaign that fall saw just a 1 percent increase in pledges. And according to some reports, the unity of purpose forged in the Murrah Building rubble has dissolved with the years. A citizens league formed out of a broad-based planning process called Oklahoma City 2020, begun prior to the bombing, is now “on the verge of bankruptcy,”
says the Kennedy School’s Sander, and old divisions have reemerged in battles over right-to-work legislation and city officials’ refusal to allow a gay-and-lesbian group to fly banners despite having obtained the proper permits.

“It shows that it’s hard to sustain these things–seeing the shared commonality rather than differences,” says Sander, who calls the Oklahoma City experience “cautionary.”

The spirit of civic unity that is vital for recovery–physical at the disaster sites; emotional in the victims’ relatives and friends; psychic for the rest of us whose comfortable world has been shaken–has been on impressive display here and across the country. But that spirit will not remain static; it will either deepen or dissipate.

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam–the guru behind Sander’s Saguaro Seminar–credits the experience of World War II with infusing a generation of Americans with sufficient civic energy to power politics and community life for 30 years. Will the “war on terrorism,” whatever it turns out to be, build our “social capital,” as Putnam calls it, or deplete it?

Currently, America is united in its shock, its pain, and its revulsion at a murderous calculus that rationalizes mass slaughter as a political statement. That commonality could be the glue that forms a powerful, and long-lasting, civic bond. But it is a fragile thing that can be cultivated only with care, and easily squandered.

The official response to the attack has counted on that public unity, but done little to channel it into civic activity. In discussions at the Saguaro Seminar, Putnam himself has observed that President Bush, in his moving call to arms against terrorism, missed an opportunity to draw a well-primed public into the national response, according to Sander.

“He thinks. . .it was a mistake that [Bush] didn’t call for personal sacrifice of any kind,” says Sander. War bonds, for instance, might not be the most efficient way to finance a military foray, but they could have “an amazing impact connecting [individuals] to a larger effort.” Sander, for his own part, would like to see more public–and media–attention directed toward actions by individuals, churches, and other groups to counteract scapegoating by patronizing Arab-American-owned business establishments and forming relationships with Muslim mosques.

Not so helpful is the president’s request that Americans “go quickly about the process of going back to their lives,” says Sander. In the wake of such a shock, he says it is both natural and necessary that people take stock of their lives and sort out what’s important to them. “I’d be surprised if [individuals] didn’t emphasize different kinds of priorities” in their post-September 11 lives, he says.

In that regard, I would add the calls to spend like drunken sailors to the list of unhelpful public messages coming from public officials, from President Bush on down. It is hard to imagine a more unsatisfying–indeed, inappropriate–way to express solidarity with each other and defiance toward those who would bring down our way of life than to go shopping. If consumers sit on their credit cards for a bit, it’s not out of an irrational hoarding instinct but the realization that there may be more to life than going to the mall. It would make more sense now to emphasize collective, rather than individual, spending, whether through government (from the war on terrorism to the push for better schools) or private philanthropy (from caring for survivors of September 11 to strengthening families in our own communities). Now is not the time to feed our material wants, but to care for one another.

Starting at the top. If the broad middle class–the bedrock of our economy, and our society–is to carry on as requested, a little more stiff upper lip in the executive suite would help. Was it absolutely necessary for the airline industry to announce layoffs of more than 100,000 workers within days of this national tragedy? The pledge by Continental Airlines’ two top executives to forego their salaries for the remainder of the year (the two divided $9.2 million in compensation in 2000) sets a better example, but it might have been more inspirational before the airline furloughed 12,000 of its employees.

Closer to home, the whining from the hospitality industry has also been unseemly. Certainly the cancelled vacations and conventions have taken their toll. But at this time of crisis, corporate citizenship calls for a bit of stoicism. The tourists will return to Boston like the birds to Capistrano. Just because today is a moment for Americans to stay close to home, postpone those business trips, and take sustenance from friends, family, and community, is no cause to shutter the inns–or call for a bailout. Gov. Swift has convened industry big wigs to devise a strategy for boosting tourism in
the wake of the September 11 disaster. But the hospitality industry doesn’t need a new pitch. It needs time, just like the rest of us.