2001 a year of extremes ending on a good note

  • Jim Hoagland / Washington Post columnist
  • Saturday, December 29, 2001 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — Year’s end gives new meaning to Dickens’ adage about the best of times and the worst of times coexisting. Brutally awakened from a decade of self-absorption, the American nation responded to the horror of Sept. 11 with a determination to survive and a resetting of national priorities that make valor, not despair, the keynote of this annus maximus.

The year’s giant event brought back to us the importance of perspective in a world that had come to thrive on information and speed. Sept. 11 did not change everything. But it bid fair to change the way we look at things, including our individual fate and our common humanity. It was a year in which firefighters and cops suddenly seemed more important to the public than rock stars or stock brokers. No year that accomplishes that change deserves completely bad reviews, however low it sank.

It was a year of U.S. military triumph in Afghanistan — but triumph that will quickly overflow that country and drag America into crisis and challenge in Pakistan. Broken Asian states that Americans had pushed to the far corners of awareness suddenly demand that we have opinions about and options for them.

It was a year in which it was a relief to learn last week that a mass murderer from Saudi Arabia had not been chosen Person of the Year by Time magazine. The Person was Rudy Giuliani, who responded with courage and dignity to Osama bin Laden’s airborne crimes.

But the two-way rub of 2001 is that without Osama, there would be no Rudy of the Year. Giuliani’s term-limited tour as New York mayor was ending in desultory fashion when greatness was thrust at him. To his credit and our salvation, he reached out and grabbed it with both hands.

Maintaining that schizophrenic character to the end, 2001 insinuates into the holidays glimpses of potentially great horrors to come. Two nuclear-armed states, India and Pakistan, exchanged artillery fire last week after Pakistani-based terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament in mid-December.

In theory India could swat Pakistan. But China will not allow its antagonistic neighbor to do that to its client neighbor. The gravest danger to world peace now lies along the Himalayas, where there are three unfriendly states with nuclear arsenals dedicated to differing concepts of national independence. The seeds of the big events of 2002 are being planted by its quirky predecessor in a last defiant act.

Giant itself, 2001 was also a killer of giants. It took from my business, my newspaper and my circle of friends two irreplaceables, Kay Graham and Herb Block. Reason enough to wish this cursed year good riddance and be gone before it had begun.

But 2001 would not go without taking also Leopold Senghor, poet, philosopher and statesman of Africa and of France and proponent of a human universality that he sang about and lived. Death found the former president of Senegal and only black member in the history of the French Academy on his apple farm in Normandy in the last days of December at age 95.

The loss of Senghor presents another opportunity to regain perspective on a complex world that cannot be explained or conquered by glib theories about globalization and the Internet that did so much to distort popular understanding of international reality before Sept. 11. Senghor worked to establish "a civilization of the universal" built from local and national values that is antithesis to that shallow form of economic globalization.

"Everyone must root himself in the values of his race, of his continent, of his nation, in order to exist," Senghor wrote, and then "become open to other races, other nations in order to grow and to flourish." It was in the cold, abstract beauty of the French language that he invented negritude and francophonie as concepts, and in which he wrote poems of Africa simultaneously haunting and joyful.

Economically it was a year in which China, India and Russia had the highest growth rates among major countries even though (or because?) they have not yet opened up their markets to the global trading system. It was the last year of the beauty and individuality of French franc notes and the ponderous weight of Germany’s deutsche mark, both to be absorbed on Jan. 1 into the efficient and unexciting (so it is hoped) euro single currency.

This was a hinge year, resembling 1945, 1968, 1973-74 and 1991 in its ability to swing the world and our understanding of it in new directions. Its finest legacy may well be the perspective and valor we will need to get through what lies just ahead.

Jim Hoagland can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or hoaglandj@washpost.com.

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