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It’s Your Patriotic Duty to Stay Indoors
We’ve been taught that eating out, shopping, and spending time together is a form of American resilience. Not this time.
The most lasting remarks given by former President George W. Bush after 9/11 didn’t come during his Oval Office address on the night of the attacks, in a speech weeks later before a joint session of Congress, or even the statement he delivered through a bullhorn atop a heap of still-smoldering rubble at ground zero, where he promised to exact vengeance. Nothing Bush said in that nervy period shaped the collective attitude of a grieving nation more than his repeated insistence that we change nothing about our daily lives.
It was the duty of all Americans to “go shopping for their families,” he urged less than a week after the attacks. Addressing jittery airline employees at O’Hare, Bush called on everyone to “get on board” and continue their “business around the country.”
“Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots,” Bush said. “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.” In a news conference a month after 9/11, Bush hit the same notes again. “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objective of frightening our nation to the point where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop,” he said. “That’s their intention.”
Bush’s directive to go shopping or take a vacation convinced Americans there was a virtue, even heroism, in their indulgences.
It’s easy to understand the allure of that sentiment, and it wasn’t entirely without merit. In the most charitable reading, it can be taken as a rallying cry to overcome fear, a variation of FDR’s iconic quote mixed with a dash of consumerism. But it’s also easy to see why a directive to go shopping and take a vacation was so wildly misconstrued, how it not only alleviated Americans of the wartime burdens shouldered by previous generations but convinced them there was a virtue, even heroism, in their indulgences. It empowered people to say “fuck you” to anyone who appeals for even a minor deviation from routine. To put it another way, it leads to this:
