A sense of wholeness can cure our despair

Last week’s national introspection suggested two opposite conclusions about American life. At the personal level, the many individual anecdotes and small memoirs of courage and self-sacrifice pointed to a citizenry characterized by goodness, a common nobility. Memorialized first-responders, self-critical journalists, coping veterans, the still burdened but resolute legion - their individual faces add up to a quilted tapestry of American hope.

But at the institutional level, the 9/11 anniversary, in combination with the discordant political rhetoric, showed what the stresses of the past decade have wrought. Every branch of government disappoints. An unelected judiciary has given elections over to moneyed special interests. Homeland security offers protection that threatens. Pentagon wars turn defense itself into defeat. Congress gives new meaning to the word broke. The wailing economy has a mind of its own, rewarding the affluent few, punishing the struggling most. Elected leaders’ seeming impotence in the face of this distress - “jobs’’ is only the latest shorthand - exacerbates the overriding problem: a collapse of trust in government so total that liberals and conservatives, otherwise opposed, jointly sponsor contempt for Washington.

Yet what if, rather than let every institution be discredited and every public principle be brought into question, we instead regard the ailing post-9/11 public realm through the other lens - the narrowly personal lens of the decent common folks who so defined the moral meaning? The flight attendants, cops, airport workers, ER nurses, back-room messengers, firefighters. The memoirs and anecdotes of 9/11 hold every single person as valuable, and what is the core of democracy if not that?