Political unity shouldn’t be this hard to find; it shouldn’t be this elusive.
It most certainly is, however.
The nation is honoring the sacrifice we endured on 9/11. Part of the honor has been to salute the unity we felt when President Bush called on us to fight the terrorists who hit us hard, who killed all those Americans.
We answered the terrorists with one clear and forceful voice.
That was then. The unity we felt in the moment didn’t last long. Bush eventually decided to expand our war against terror by invading Iraq in March 2003. The president lied to us. He told us the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction; they didn’t. He also sought to tell us that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein played a role in the 9/11 attacks; he didn’t.
We’ve been divided ever since.
Two decades later we are now fighting an even more insidious enemy. It’s a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 Americans, far more than who died in the 9/11 attacks.
President Biden is seeking to unify us against the pandemic. He can’t find the formula. Our divisions have been cast along partisan lines. Democrats push for vaccine and mask mandates; Republicans resist them both. Think of this for a moment. Our entire nation is being struck by a virus, yet the president can’t unify us.
Surely we don’t require an attack from a foreign enemy to bring us together. Or do we?