Self-Absorbed America May Not Be Ready to Sacrifice

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“Sacrifice” is a word that’s popped up a lot in the wake of what happened on Sept. 11 starting when several passengers on board a United Airlines flight heroically prevented terrorists from crashing into the Capitol building or goodness knows what.

That was the ultimate sacrifice. But President Bush and others are now using the word in another context: to marshal American resolve in combating terrorism as well as in dealing with the likelihood of recession.

Nothing wrong with such sentiment. The question is whether it has a place in today’s consumptive, self-involved America.

Webster’s defines “sacrifice” as “the act of giving up or forgoing something valued for the sake of something having a more pressing claim.”

To see whether we were up to the definition, I visited a Westside shopping center on the Saturday after the catastrophe. What I found was the America of plenty the America that doesn’t want to forgo anything. A few examples:

Owners of gas-guzzling SUVs held up traffic so they could get a spot a few feet closer to the entrance.

Supermarket shoppers loaded up their carts with $15 steaks.

Newsstands were jammed with magazines that trumpeted the good life. One monthly, published well before the attacks, had on its cover a beautiful woman holding in one hand a fancy-looking plate of food and a glass of wine in the other. Its headline: “Entertaining With Style.”

This version of America is unaccustomed to making sacrifices. It’s an America that not only wants to keep up with the Joneses, but leave them in its dust.

This impulse towards business as usual rightfully encouraged by Bush in an effort to soothe nerves has the additional and potentially dangerous effect of implying that the crisis is under control. This is especially true for anyone without direct ties to Ground Zero. New York Times columnist Frank Rich observed during a radio interview that by the end of the first week he was beginning to get routine e-mail from people outside the city.

And last week you could detect an almost palpable itch to move on, as if folks were somehow playing the same emotional tapes as during the L.A. riots or the Oklahoma City bombing. Television commercials were back on, the sports pages again had box scores even the flags were starting to be taken down. The New York Times found a college student who had spent $130 on clothes the Sunday after the attack. “Personally, I don’t feel affected,” she told the newspaper.

To be fair, there’s a cathartic benefit in getting back to business. And yet it feels wrong. Aside from waiting in long airport lines or donating a few bucks to the Red Cross, how many of us feel we’ve truly made a sacrifice for our country?

I know I haven’t. I tried to come up with examples where I’ve made a genuine patriotic sacrifice, and the best I could come up with was gasoline rationing in the 1970s (and that wasn’t by choice). No military service. No Peace Corps. Just a law-abiding guy who works hard and tries to do right for his family.

This, of course, has been the idea all along: Peace and prosperity for generations lucky enough to have missed the bad old days. Americans have had so much of a good thing for so long that they’ve just assumed the boom times would never end. And war? That’s something our parents and grandparents had to worry about, not us.

For the last two weeks, we’ve been inundated with comparisons about the nation’s resolve following Pearl Harbor, but the differences between then and now are profound. When the Japanese invaded in 1941, the world already had been a volatile place for the previous 20 years with the ongoing war in Europe, and before that, the Great Depression and World War I. In that environment, there were few arguments about military conscription or ration coupons.

Consider what we have been through over the past 20 years: the longest peacetime expansion ever and a 10-year-long bull market. Consider, too, that before Sept. 11, Gary Condit and the dot-com demise were still big news stories.

So now we are confronted with two very different and powerful forces the force that values sacrifice and good deeds, and the force that still wants to have it our way. There’s no telling which will prevail, but in the end it will reflect both who we are and what we can be.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal.

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