Author’s note: Wow! You’ve got to get up early in the morning if you are going to stay a relevant blogger. (I guess that’s why people always picture bloggers in their PJs.) So I had a blog started at the office, forgot to e-mail it to myself and now it’s irrelevant and I’ve got to start over.
I was going to avoid this until next month, but after the exchange over at THH (http://thehellhole.forumup.org/about414-thehellhole.html) and the release of Oliver Stone’s film (http://www.wtcmovie.com ) I guess now is as good as time as any to start touching on the subject.
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Yeah, let’s talk about 9/11 (or 11/9 for our Brit Pals – more than willing to make accommodations for you folks, you saved a lot of American bacon last week). Background: Mother was working in the financial services industry back in ’01 – mutual funds to be exact – and I was on a business trip and subsequently stranded for a couple of days. My boss at the time was one subway stop away from WTC and was one of those people you saw on CNN trying to outrun the cloud of debris caused by the towers’ collapse. The board members I was playing stenographer to in San Francisco were all lifelong New Yorkers who had spent their careers in the finance industry. Part of my regular job was to talk to people from the big brokerage houses in Manhattan, including some at WTC. The company had an office in Midtown Manhattan where a co-worker’s husband, who worked in Tower 1, was missing for 18 hours in the confusion, while the airborne scraps of lives cut short drifted over the river and into her front yard in Brooklyn. Financial Services is a small world; everybody knows everybody. Every aspect of our working lives was affected by 9/11, in addition to, just like the rest of the country, the very personal yet very collective experience of that day.
But here we are five very long or very short years later, and people, primarily media people looking for box office and/or ratings, want to have a look back. My initial reaction is “Back??? How on earth can you look back? We are still living it, still directly in the aftermath, the foaming blood-stained wake. How can you look back on events when they are still unfolding?” But in the new media with its never-ending news cycle, events must be pared down, and we are being forced to separate the events of the single infamous day from all the fallout, though it drifts down on us daily like some eerie, radioactive snow. And even so, I shrink from looking back to that day. This isn’t yet a scar that can be displayed after a few beers on a Saturday night. It isn’t even yet a scab that can be picked at to reveal bright pink layers of newly formed skin. To me, this is still one big, national, gaping, sucking, blood-spurting wound. As a nation we are hardly out of psychological intensive care where 9/11 is concerned. Yet the anniversary approaches and CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Oliver Stone, and probably the Home Shopping Channel, are demanding we explore everything from the jagged edges of torn flesh to deepest layers of shrapnel embedded in the tendon and muscle of our still recovering country.
And so, the first thought that comes to mind is the size, how really monumental the moment felt. There was no doubt that this was a moment of enormous human historic importance. Without consciously thinking it, I knew this was going to change everything. None of us in American who were live that day would be the same when we awoke tomorrow, given we were lucky enough to have a tomorrow. The second impression was how it seemed so incomprehensible. There was a disconnect from what we all knew and accepted to be true – that we were safe within our borders. True, only a few years before homegrown terrorists had blown up a building in Oklahoma City, but that single attack, followed by the quick identification and capture of the people responsible had, in some ways reinforced our feeling of invincibility. This was the act of local, homegrown whackos – 9/11 was, is, and remains, an act of war.
I can hear some people already, saying Mother, you old peacenik you! How can you say such a thing? You sound like that Shrub in the Whitehouse! Because, children, it’s true. I don’t think many of us realized then that war had been declared on us because the first strikes were distant – the USS Cole, the bombing of Embassies, the comparatively minor first attack on WTC. We didn’t see their importance. The media swept them away in what was then a 24-hour news cycle to be replaced by cloned sheep, Chuck & Di’s divorce, how Timmy was faring at Wimbledon. We didn’t know we were at war, but our enemies did. We had treated them like flies to be swatted at. We didn’t hear them except as a faint buzzing. We didn’t listen. We didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on in far-flung regions of the world. Now, we didn’t have to. Now, the war we didn’t know existed had been dropped on our doorstep. And afterwards, some might say even right up to this moment, Americans still didn’t understand who the enemy was, why the enemy hated us, where they were from, or what their history was, and so we are destined to remain in a war, and I’m not talking about the one in Iraq, neither side can win.
The third impression I’ll save for the moment and move to the fourth – shame. Too quickly, many in our nation moved from the shock and horror of the day to hatred. Not some new hatred of some new enemy. No, these were old hatreds being allowed to come out of the closet under the guise of patriotism. These were the days when most Americans didn’t know an Arab from a Persian or a Sunni from a Shiite. Sadly, what some people did know were “camel jockeys,” “towel heads” and worse. We couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map, but we were more than willing to blow the shit out of it. I remember the impatience of the American public – when are we going to start kicking ass? What’s taking Bush so long? I guess he’s made up for that lost time by now, hasn’t he? While what felt like a slight handful of us were asking for patience, were looking for alternatives to violence -- to stop the escalating cycle of violence begetting more violence before it could start -- most of America wanted instant retribution. Suddenly our neighbors couldn’t be trusted because they were dark-skinned, spoke with a foreign accent, didn’t wear the same clothes we wore. Certain businesses suddenly had far fewer customers. Where I live, a man was pulled from his vehicle and beaten, his assailants believing him to be from the Middle East. They only realized their mistake when their victim’s pleas for help were uttered in Spanish. He was recently arrived from Mexico, the country of his attackers’ parents and grandparents. The nation was spoiling for a fight. Something needed to get blown up and fast. Subsequently, we blew up Afghanistan, we blew up Iraq, we allowed Israel to blow up Lebanon and Gaza, and for some people, apparently all this is still not enough. And the enemy, the enemy whose war we could no longer ignore five years ago, that enemy continues to grow stronger and will eventually act again with the same boldness because we still don’t seem to understand who we are fighting or why. We still don’t listen. We still don’t learn.
But let’s go back to that third impression. Impression No. 3: The hope of that day. New Yorkers pulled together. Americans pulled together. From here in the United States it felt like the whole world pulled together. There was a website that displayed messages and images of support from everywhere, from tiny Greek Islands to the island-continent of Australia, from always friendly Canada to former enemy Russia, from trusted ally Britain to not-always-trusted China. That day, wandering San Francisco in search of an open restaurant, people were friendlier. They remembered the manners their parents had taught them. People were the people they always knew they could be if they tried, and they stayed those people for weeks afterwards. Americans had the goodwill of the world, and I’d say a majority of them deserved it in those first early hours of this new world we were going to have to live in from now on. So many people died, and those who survived will always carry with them the images of those lost. To this day, I honestly, truly believe there isn’t a single American who wants those deaths to be in vain – no matter what political stripe we wear, no matter if we are pro-war or anti-war, no matter where we live or what direction our lives have taken these past five years. We want for those that suffered so terribly that day to be able to rest their spirits knowing that somehow, at some point, their deaths will have meaning. I remember thinking at the time that this new dawn would grow to shed its light on a new era of peace; that people had at last realized that we are all connected, we are a global community, and the plight of one is the plight of all.
Five years on, with all that goodwill squandered by our government and the country bogged down in an ill-advised, poorly executed, downright shameful war, that thought would be almost comical if it weren’t for the tragic truth that we are all connected and the plight of one -- be it an Iraqi shopkeeper in Baghdad, an American exchange student in Beirut, a grandmother in Tel Aviv, a stockbroker in Manhattan, a working mom in Los Angeles, a musician in Great Britain, an economics major in Denmark, or a motorcycle-riding hell-raiser in Delaware – is the plight of all, but too many people are still years of bloodshed, hatred, ignorance, and intolerance away from realizing the truth of it.
Five years ago, I wasn’t a particularly political person. Five years later, I feel a moral obligation to voice my dissent with this government. Five years ago, this country was a place for freedom and optimism. Five years later, it is a place of unreasoning fear, stained to its soul by the shame of becoming too much like its enemies. Five years ago, I couldn’t believe what was happening. Five years later, I can’t believe it hasn’t happened again. Five years ago, I couldn’t conceive of an attack within the continental US. Five year later, the next time is only a matter of time. I hope that when we are finally able to have a real look back, say in 50 years, when the whole story of 9/11 has played out, in Afghanistan, in Britain, in Iran, in Iraq, in Israel, in Lebanon, in Pakistan, in Palestine, in Somalia, in Syria, and in the United States, that this oftentimes hopeless-looking situation we face has reached its conclusion because ultimately people recognized, rescued, and recovered the hope of that day. If so, that hope, that unity, that humanity becomes the lasting legacy of 9/11.
