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ourselves with precautions. Iargued right after 9/11 thatthe reason our intelligence

did not pick up the 9/11 plotters was "a failure of imagination." We just did not

have enough people within our intelligence community with a sick enough imagination

to match that of bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We do need some people like

that within our intelligence services. But we all don't need to go down that route.

We all don't need to become so gripped by imagining the worst in everyone around us

that we shrink into ourselves.

In 2003, my older daughter, Orly, was in her high school's symphonic orchestra. They

spent all year practicing to take part in the national high school orchestra

competition in New Orleans that March. When March rolled around, it appeared that

we were heading for war in Iraq, so the Montgomery County School Board canceled all

out-of-town trips by school groups-including the orchestra's attendance at New

Orleans- fearing an outbreak of terrorism. I thought this was absolutely nuts. Even

the evil imagination of 9/11 has its limits. At some point you do have to ask yourself

whether Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were really sitting around a cave in

Afghanistan, with Ayman saying to Osama, "Say, Osama, d'you remember that annual high

school orchestra competition in New Orleans? Well, it's coming up again next week.

Let's really make a splash and go after it."

No, I don't think so. Let's leave the cave dwelling to bin Laden. We have to be the

masters of our imaginations, not the prisoners. I had a friend in Beirut who used

to joke that every time she flew on an airplane she packed a bomb in her suitcase,

because the odds of two people car

rying a bomb on the same plane were so much higher. Do whatever it takes, but get

out the door.

Apropos of that, let me share the 9/11 story that touched me most from the New York

Times series "Portraits of Grief," the little biographies of those who were killed.

It was the story of Candace Lee Williams, the twenty-year-old business student at

Northeastern University, who had worked from January to June of 2001 as a work-study

intern at the Merrill Lynch office on the fourteenth floor of 1 World Trade Center.

Both Candace's mother and colleagues described her to The New York Times as a young

woman full of energy and ambition, who loved her internship. Indeed, Candace's

colleagues at Merrill Lynch liked her so much they took her to dinner on her last

day of work, sent her home in a limousine, and later wrote Northeastern to say, "Send

us five more like Candace." A few weeks after finishing midterm exams-she was on a

June-December academic schedule-Candace Lee Williams decided to meet her roommate

at her home in California. Candace had recently made the dean's list. "They'd rented

a convertible preparing for the occasion, and Candace wanted her picture taken with

that Hollywood sign," her mother, Sherri, told the Times.

Unfortunately, Candace took the American Airlines Flight 11 that departed from

Boston's Logan Airport on the morning of September 11, 2001, at 8:02 a.m. The plane

was hijacked at 8:14 a.m. by five men, including Mohammed Atta, who was in seat 8D.

With Atta at the controls, the Boeing 767-223ER was diverted to Manhattan and slammed

Candace Lee Williams right back into the very same World Trade Center tower-between

floors 94 and 98-where she had worked as an intern.

Airline records show that she was seated next to an eighty-year-old grandmother-two

people at opposites ends of life: one full of memories, one full of dreams.

What does this story say to me? It says this: When Candace Lee Williams boarded Flight

11 she could not have imagined how it would end. But in the wake of 9/11, none of

us can now board an airplane without imagining how it could end-that what happened

to Candace Lee

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Williams could also happen to us. We all are now so much more conscious that a person's

life can be wiped out by the arbitrary will of a madman in a cave in Afghanistan.

But the fact is, the chances of our plane being hijacked by terrorists today are still

infinitesimal. We are more likely to be killed hitting a deer with our car or being

struck by lightning. So even though we can now imagine what could happen when we get

on an airplane, we have to get on the plane anyway. Because the alternative to not

getting on that plane is putting ourselves in our own cave. Imagination can't just

be about reruns. It also has to be about writing our own new script. From what I read

about Candace Lee Williams, she was an optimist. I'd bet anything she'd still be

getting on planes today if she had the chance. And so must we all.

America's role in the world, from its inception, has been to be the country that looks

forward, not back. One of the most dangerous things that has happened to America since

9/11, under the Bush administration, is that we have gone from exporting hope to

exporting fear. We have gone from trying to coax the best out of the world to snarling

at it way too often. And when you export fear, you end up importing everyone else's

fears. Yes, we need people who can imagine the worst, because the worst did happen

on 9/11 and it could happen again. But, as I said, there is a fine line between

precaution and paranoia, and at times we have crossed it. Europeans and others often

love to make fun of American optimism and naivete-our crazy notion that every problem

has a solution, that tomorrow can be better than yesterday, that the future can always

bury the past. But I have always believed that deep down the rest of the world envies

that American optimism and naivete, it needs it. It is one of the things that help

keep the world spinning on its axis. If we go dark as a society, if we stop being

the world's "dream factory," we will make the world not only a darker place but also

a poorer place.

Analysts have always tended to measure a society by classical economic and social

statistics: its deficit-to-GDP ratio, or its unemployment rate, or the rate of

literacy among its adult women. Suchstatistics are important and revealing. But there

is another statistic, much harder

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to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have

more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?

By dreams I mean the positive, life-affirming variety. The business organization

consultant Michael Hammer once remarked, "One thing that tells me a company is in

trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries.

You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth

century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is

near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon

what made it successful and start fresh."

In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too

many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by

mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real

past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their

imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and

then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining

a better future and acting on that. It is dangerous enough when other countries go

down that route; it would be disastrous for America to lose its bearings and move

in that direction. I think my friend David Rothkopf, the former Commerce Department

official and now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said

it best: "The answer for us lies not in what has changed, but in recognizing what

has not changed. Because only through this recognition will we begin to focus on the

truly critical issues-an effective multilateral response to weapons of mass

destruction proliferation, the creation of real stakeholders in globalization among

the world's poor, the need for reform in the Arab world and a style of U.S. leadership

that seeks to build our base of support worldwide by getting more people to voluntarily

sign onto our values. We need to remember that those values are the real foundation

for our security and the real source of our strength. And we need to recognize that

our enemies can never defeat us. Only we can defeat ourselves, by throwing out the

rule book that has worked for us for a long, long time."

I believe that history will make very clear that President Bush shame

lessly exploited the emotions around 9/11 for political purposes. He used those 9/11

emotions to take a far-right Republican domestic agenda on taxes, the environment,

and social issues from 9/10-an agenda for which he had no popular mandate-and drive

it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr.Bush not only drove a wedge between Americans,

and between Americans and the world, he drove a wedge between America and its own

history and identity. His administration transformed the United States into "the

United States of Fighting Terrorism." This is the real reason, in my view, that so

many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely. They feel that he has

taken away something very dear to them-an America that exports hope, not fear.

We need our president to restore September 11 to its rightful place on the calendar-as

the day after September 10 and before September 12. We must never let it become a

day that defines us. Because ultimately September 11 is about them-the bad guys-not

about us.

We're about the Fourth of July. We're about 11/9.

Beyond trying to retain the best of our own imaginations, what else can we do as

Americans and as a global society to try to nurture the same in others? One has to

approach this question with great humility. What leads one person to the joy of

destruction and what leads another to the joy of creation, what leads one to imagine

11/9 and another to imagine 9/11, is surely one of the great mysteries of contemporary

life. Moreover, while most of us might have some clue about how to nurture a more

positive imagination for our own kids, and maybe-maybe-for our fellow citizens, it

is presumptuous to think that we can do it for others, particularly those of a

different culture, speaking different languages, and living half a world away. Yet

9/11, the flattening of the world, and the continuing threat of world-disrupting

terrorism suggest that not thinking about this is its own kind of dangerous naivete.

So I insist on trying to do so, but I approach this issue with a keen awareness of

the limits of what any outsider can know or do.

Generally speaking, imagination is the product of two shaping forces. One is the

narratives that people are nurtured on-the stories and myths

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they and their religious and national leaders tell themselves-and how those

narratives feed their imaginations one way or another. The other is the context in

which people grow up, which has a huge impact on shaping how they see the world and

others. Outsiders cannot get inside and adjust the Mexican or Arab or Chinese

narrative any more than they can get inside the American one. Only they can reinterpret

their narrative, make it more tolerant or forward looking, and adapt it to modernity.

No one can do thatfor them or even with them. But one can think about how to collaborate

with others to change their context-the context within which people grow up and live

their daily lives-to help nurture more people with the imagination of 11/9 than 9/11.

Let me offer a few examples.

eBay

Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, once told me a wonderful story that went like this:

"We took eBay public in September 1998, in the middle of the dot-com boom. And in

September and October our stock would go up eighty points and down fifty in a single

day. I thought, 'This is insane.' Anyway, one day I am minding my own business, sitting

in my own cubicle, and my secretary runs over and says to me, 'Meg, it's Arthur Levitt

[chairman] of the SEC on the phone.'" The Securities and Exchange Commission oversees

the stock market and is always concerned about issues of volatility in a stock and

whether there is manipulation behind it. In those days, for a CEO to hear that "Arthur

Levitt is on the line" was not a good way to start the day.

"So I called my general counsel," said Whitman, "who came over from his cubicle, and

he was white like a sheet. We called Levitt back together and we put him on the

speakerphone, and I said, 'Hi, it's Meg Whitman of eBay.' And he said, 'Hi, it's Arthur

Levitt of the SEC. I don't know you and have never met you but I know that you just

went public and I want to know: How did it go? Were we [the SEC] customer-friendly?'

And so we breathed a sigh of relief, and we talked about that a

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little bit. And then [Levitt] said, 'Well, actually, another reason that I am calling

is that I just got my tenth positive feedback on eBay and have earned my yellow star.

And I am so proud.' And then he said, 'I am actually a collector of Depression-era

glass, post-1929, and so I have bought and sold on eBay and you get feedback as a

buyer and seller. And I thought you would just like to know.'"

Every eBay user has a feedback profile made up of comments from other eBay users who

have done transactions with him or her, relating to whether the goods bought or sold

were asexpected and the transaction went off smoothly. This constitutes your official

"eBay reputation." You get +1 point for each positive comment, 0 points for each

neutral comment, and -1 for each negative comment. A colored star icon is attached

to your user ID on eBay for ten or more feedback points. My user ID on eBay might

be TOMF (50) and a blue star, which means that I have received positive feedback