A few weeks ago I recommended checking out the new Substack of my friend Rachel Lu. Yesterday, Rachel posted a piece looking back on 9/11 in Law & Liberty which I highly recommend as well. It’s a piece I find especially resonant because Rachel writes about joining the Peace Corps in the wake of the attacks, and I did exactly the same thing.
In fact, we were classmates at Notre Dame at the time, and both happened to end up as Peace Corps volunteers in different former Soviet Republics in Central Asia — Rachel in Uzbekistan and I in Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan was certainly the more Islamic of the two, Kazakhstan more cosmopolitan and secular. More than the biographical similarities, however, I found myself resonating with the sentiments Rachel expresses — from a slightly naive but still fundamentally good youthful idealism to a deeper concern over the self-destructive tendencies American culture has shown in the quarter century since 9/11. I even learned a new word — oikophobia — which seems apt.
Here’s Rachel’s blurb about the essay in Substack:
I never risked life or limb like [those who signed up for military service], and signed on only for a form of service you’re allowed to quit at any time (though I didn’t, at least not until my term of service was up). Still, my little contribution meant something, at least to me, and I go on to reflect on how Americans’ understanding of themselves has changed over time. So much, in fact, that one sometimes wonders: Did Osama bin Laden finally win the war of hearts and minds?
Check out the whole essay “Mirrors of 9/11” here.
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 