I was born and raised in New York. I lived a few blocks north of the Towers, a block off the West Side Highway. I had worked in the Towers, had eaten at Windows on the World. I now live in Hawaii, where it was almost 5:00 am when a good friend of mine called to tell me what was going on. Confused and groggy, I could barely understand what she was saying: turn on the t.v.
I did, just in time to see the second tower crumble. I didn't really know what I was looking at. Was it a drama? Was this the news? I stood in the shock and horror that all of us who were watching shared that morning; more so perhaps because I had lived near there, worked there, knew people there. Yet, either because I was sleepy or half a planet away, it still felt remote and unreal. Before that second tower even hit the ground, I knew that American life would be profoundly changed, though not in the way the newscasters and politicos, in their sober or half-hysterical intonings, said it would be.
Something about the whole thing felt wrong, deeply and irrevocably wrong, as though there was a hidden narrative, moving in contraflow to the narrative being pieced together by those people who create social master-narratives.
In the days that followed, I heard the speechifying, the animal cry for vengeance, watched any notion of objectivity discarded in favor of a sudden and virulent nationalistic fervor. By September 13, after two days of non-stop television watching and web surfing, I wrote the following entry in my private journal. I came across it by accident just yesterday as I was going through my old files, and it seemed an appropriate synchronicity. I wouldn't have dared, back then, to have posted these thoughts in any public space, deeming them too heartless and cynical for that time. I wouldn't even have had a public space to which I could post them, since I had not yet heard of Daily Kos or the blogosphere. It was 9/11 and its aftermath that drew me here. Today, though, five years on, the cynicism of these comments seems more than appropriate; it seems true:
"9/13/2001:
There is no other subject, yet it's the one I wish to discuss least. There's no way outside of it. Suddenly it's as if the rest of the world stopped its ritual slaughter, exploitation and sexual dalliance. Our media permit no window to the outside. It's become a locus of all thought; anything else is impermissible. On CNN's web site, the "other news" link carries stories that relate to it in some way. And now, of course, everyone's out for blood. Americans get hysterical pretty easily. Not to say that it wasn't awful and heinous. Not to say that most of the superlatives our news anchors struggle to pronounce aren't appropriate. Not to say that it isn't a reason for a depth and immensity of public grief the likes of which have not been felt in my short lifetime. But it's certainly not the worst thing that's ever happened. It's the element of total surprise, I think, that's got everyone so rhapsodically emotional. That and the egocentrically naive belief that it couldn't happen here. If it were a slow, spreading ruination, like the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, the Crusades, I think fewer people would care so vigorously and so publically. As a nation we have little real experience of national grief (the Columbia disaster is a weak analogy), and we have few faculties for calmly assessing a public horror. It's not part of the experience here. So we overreact. Yes. Overreact.
Some will argue that no intensity of reaction, no level of anger or sorrow could be possibly be commensurate with the assault. In the face of such monstrosity, any response is permissible. But when we are motivated by gibbering and unreasoned fear into to forfeit our civil rights, when we are unified in a call for vengeance and bloodshed, when we equate capitalism with democracy and freedom, when the media exploit our private sorrows by publicizing them in some electronic catharsis, when I am told that "nothing will ever be the same" (which is both always true and never so scary as it seems), when our journalists inflame rather than inform, when every newscast uses the vocabulary of elegy, when I am instructed as to what properly to feel, when a sudden great "we" replaces the personal pronoun, when allocations of resources measure in the billions before any plan of action materializes, when I am told when and how to pray (as if not praying were unacceptable), when I am told what to say to my children to "help them understand," when our first response is to call ourselves a "nation at war," then, yes, we are overreacting. Or, more accurately, mis-reacting.
Wild emotionalism has blinded people to calm, objective assessment. The war cry has gone out, or confused mumbling at the realization that there is, as yet, no enemy to fight. There is no way to raise the more frightening probability that we created the enemy. Even so, the coming war will be like the war on drugs: impossible to fight with brute force. Drugs, like terrorism, are a symptom of other conditions. To solve the problem, the conditions must be addressed. This is basic logic, which at this historical moment, holds no counsel with policy makers or the public. The terrorists' methods are indefensible; their message, unfortunately, has substance. And even if we console ourselves with the idea that their method exposes the bankruptcy of their message, it simply is not so. These attacks have logic, however psychotically expressed. They are, in part, a response to American foreign policy, to global capitalism, to their own poverty and dispossession. They are fanatics, yes, and they do hate us. But there are reasons they hate us and not, say, the Swedes. But it is impossible to have this discussion, not now, perhaps not ever. Rhetoric has grown thicker than blood and dust.
There is no moral high ground. We are not innocent victims, though the individuals in those towers may have been. We're about to embark on yet another war; who knows how many will be killed? And because our response is to be ineluctably violent, we essentially guarantee that the bloodshed will continue...indefinitely. It's so sad, such a lost opportunity. We could have, through the restraint of our response, initiated a new age in human consciousness. Instead, it'll be more of the same, more of the same, more of the same."
Today, I feel my words then have been vindicated, and I am more comfortable saying them aloud. Because of the way 9/11 has been exploited, I've had a hard time all these years letting my heart be open to the tragedy, to feeling, deeply, the sadness for all the genuine fear and suffering the victims and their families endured. To being more angry at the terrorists than I am at the Bush administration. But today, five years later, I can feel it, and I can shed tears for all that has happened on and since that day, to the victims, to the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the civilians dying in those wars, and to all of us.