Consumerism and the coopting of national trauma

ONE OF THE EFFECTS of national tragedies is their tendency to foreground our view of ourselves as a nation. In any of the great traumatizing events in U.S. history that the writers of this essay have lived through or know about (World War II, the Korean War, the Cuban Crisis, the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the Challenger explosion, the Gulf War, the 2000 Presidential election, and the terrible events of September 11, 2001), the psychological, interpersonal, economic, and spiritual consequences for our national identity were profound, and we adjusted our national identity in an attempt to weather the storm. In the political arena, in the media, in the workplace, and in schools, our conversations reflected our struggle to define appropriate ways to respond to crises that in one way or other affected us all.