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The Top Comments Team decided that instead of a single-author diary tonight, we'd like to offer a collaborative reflection on our thoughts on 9/11 now that ten years have passed. We'd like to invite you to share yours as well, either in the comments or with a link to something else you've written on the site today.
Follow me below the dingledoodlesquiggliedividerthingie fold and reflect with us...
From brillig:
I was in the shower when news of the first plane broke, I turned the TV on moments before the second hit, and immediately called Mr. Brillig. He was watching and listening too with everyone at work. He left work early - I think everyone did that day - and went to pick up K1, who was 3 and in preschool. Her daycare was in a building that housed a public transportation hub, and in the panic of that day, we decided she needed to be home with us. Ten years later, I'm left with a story, a memory, and jumbled emotions.
The Story: When Mr. Brillig entered the daycare room to get K1, he found her standing in the center of the room with a handful of her hair in her hands. "We were playing haircut!" She and her bff V got their hands on a pair of scissors, and decided to give each other haircuts. We saved that hair, and tell the story very year, as a remembrance of the only part of the day that made us smile.
The Memory: Late in the afternoon, we simply had to tear ourselves away from the coverage, and eat. We walked the half mile to a local sub/sandwich shop. I remember how eerily quiet it was without the constant air traffic overhead. The other thing I remember from that trip to dinner was how polite everyone was to each other. No fighting for parking spots. No taking-your-life-in-your-hands trying to cross the street. No trash talk from one table of teens to another. No, we were all stuck in a moment when Do Unto Others, or perhaps the more colloquial Don't Be A Dick, was the Law of the Land. I miss that one little piece of the collective response to tragedy, the basic human kindnesses of the day. We went back all too quickly to dog-eat-dog, I believe as a result of the example our then-President gave.
The Emotions: Last month I attended a memorial service for my Mother, at which we were reminded by her former priest about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. < sigh > Post-9/11 I was made to feel selfish for grieving her. "So many people died, don't you want to attend a service for them?" I didn't know anyone personally who died that day.. I didn't get to finish mourning her death on my own time scale, because I was supposed to mourn thousands of others. While I'd never minimize their lives, or the impact of each loss on those who were left behind... isn't that what I was expected to do?
Finally, I'm left wondering what might have been, if our country had been led by a different, more capable President. One who didn't think with the heavy hand of avenging his Daddy's experience, but who set out to bring to justice the men who planned and supported this terrorist act. Who might we be as individuals, as a nation? What would my now 13 year old daughter know as her childhood.
From Dragon5616:
The thing I remember most about 9/11 is the feeling I had in my gut as I watched the towers fall. For the first time in my life, I really understood how someone could put on a uniform, pick up a gun, and kill or die for his country. Of course, I was nearly 50 at the time so enlistment wasn't a real possibility. The sad part is that that feeling, shared by so many Americans at the time, was quickly exploited for petty political gain by the worst president in American history, horribly dividing a country that had truly unified for the first time since World War II.
From Ed Tracey:
You are looking at a cousin-of-a-cousin of mine named Terry Farrell ......
... who was lost in the South Tower (WTC-2) but (mercifully) his body was found seven weeks later. Yet even before that date he had become a hero: by volunteering to become a bone marrow donor, and a woman is now (or will be) 23 years old this year as a result.
In fact, back in 1994 when she was 6 years old, Chantyl Peterson and her family travelled to New York from Nevada to meet her donor. And......hold on to your hats........they had lunch.....on the 87th floor of......the World Trade Center.
They met again in 1999 and then, during the time when Terry was still listed as "missing", Chantyl told her mother that if he was found alive that "I'll tell him not to ever get hurt again."
When it turned out to be otherwise, her father told her the news and so she made a third trip in October of 2001 to read a prayer at his funeral as a 13 year-old. You may not be able to become a hero by becoming a firefighter ... but volunteer to be a bone marrow donor and you may become a hero, anyway.
From asimbagirl:
I live in California, and on September 11, 2001, I was sleeping in. Tuesdays were my day off. My husband called me at 6:30 in the morning and told me to turn on the TV. That phone call had me getting our roommate up – she and her two daughters were living with us as she went through a divorce – and we watched tv in horror as we prayed that our daughters would stay asleep a little while longer. I just kept thinking, “Nothing will be the same now.” I remember turning off CBS news after they kept showing images of people committing suicide before the towers fell. I remember feeling like Peter Jennings was almost a member of the family by the time the week was out. His death still brings tears to my eyes. My daughter, 3 years old then, is now a freshman in high school. I’ve debated how to handle this anniversary with her. I’m no closer to a decision now. 9/11 has been so horrifically politicized that I want her to understand the magnitude of the event on a human level, but I’m not sure how to get there. To a certain extent, she DOES understand it – last August, the stepdad of one of her best friends was killed in action in Afghanistan – a place we wouldn’t be if not for the attacks on 9/11. In November, he became a father for the first time, and that fact breaks my heart every single day.
From smileycreek:
We were stranded in Denver on 9/11 and drove our rental car back to California, starting out north through Wyoming. There was not a plane or jet in the desert skies. There was not a state trooper or highway patrolman on the roads. There were no big rig trucks. The emptiness of the desert skies and highways had an eerie, post-apocalyptic feeling, as if we had finally succeeded in destroying ourselves after all. In Utah we drove past an Amtrak train carrying passengers from canceled flights that had collided with a freight train, and a helicopter hovered in the rising plumes of black smoke.
Everywhere we stopped for food or gas strangers gathered and spoke to one another without any of the usual social constrictions. Through the long hours of open sky and open road I thought that sense of longing for shared humanity would carry us through, that we would all wake up and pull together, but instead our President told us to go shopping and act as if everything was normal.
From gizmo59:
I was doing my morning yoga when when the first announcement that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center was reported on the radio. The station had switched to its classical music format at 9 AM, and so the announcement came as an interruption to the music. We have never had a TV, so radio, and specifically National Public Radio, was our principal news source. Upon hearing the news of the crash, my initial assumption was that it had been a small plane. I vaguely remember having heard about a small plane crashing into a building perhaps a year or two before, and I thought that this was just another accident of this sort. Then the music was interrupted again with the news that another plane had hit the other tower, and that's when I began to think something was terribly wrong. Mozart continued to duel with the progressively frequent news bulletins until, finally, the station gave up on Mozart and plugged directly into the NPR news feed for the rest of the day. They went to a reporter at the Pentagon getting ready for a press conference on the situation in New York. Then the reporters were all told to evacuate the building, that it had just been hit by another plane. I finally understood at that point that the nation was under attack, and that these crashes were clearly the work of terrorist hijackers. Meanwhile the Pentagon reporter (can't recall who it was) left the building and just started reporting on the crash, and interviewing people as he attempted to make his way back to Washington. The news reporting became just calling people in lower Manhattan and Washington to ask them what they saw and what they experienced.
I was scheduled to teach a lab that day. I no longer recall quite when I got in to my office. I recall hearing about the collapse of the towers. I recall mentioning it to a service employee on campus who said her father lived near the WTC. I immediately regretted telling her when I saw her reaction. There was speculation and endless discussion over what had been the target of Flight 93, which went down some 100+ miles from us. Eventually, classes were cancelled for the rest of the day, and we all went home. It was some days before I saw any footage of the towers on the day of the attack, via the internet.
I was very fortunate. No one I knew was killed or injured on that day. Some friends and acquaintances told stories about their close calls ("I was headed to New York for a meeting but never got there"...or "I got stuck there for the next three days"...etc), but there was no tragedy in those stories, only coincidence and inconvenience.
Ten years later, I look back and think about how our country has changed. We now live in a surveillance state. We became involved in two open-ended wars, one of which was based upon nothing but lies. Our government has sanctioned torture, and while this has come to an end, those responsible for it have thus far gone unpunished. I try to avoid thinking about this because I find it so disturbing. How could this have happened? How could a nation such as ours, that in the past had prided itself on its treatment of detainees, have fallen so far so fast? And then, how is it possible that once word got out, the main reaction of the public was just a collective shrug? How could Bush have been re-elected after this news got out? I still don't understand it.
As far I can tell, the only good that has come out of 9/11 are the stories of heroism and love. The policy decisions made by our government seem to have brought about nothing but chaos and more tragedy. I used to think I understood my country, more or less. Perhaps that was never true, but now I know I don't understand it, and furthermore, I barely recognize it anymore. That, I fear, will be the lasting legacy of 9/11.
From BeninSC:
9/11 changed our world forever ...
9/11 changed everything ...
We’ll never be the same ...
Our world will never be the same ...
International relations will never be the same ...
How many times have we read that?
I confess I sometimes become impatient with pronouncements like that. There is NEVER a time when our world isn’t changing. There is nothing that EVER happens that doesn’t change the world. Quiverings on atomic levels change our world. Always have, always will. But how significant are those changes? How important?
Of COURSE 9/11 changed our world. But how? Not all changes are created equal. When two bodies of metal collide, physics decides what the consequences are. But when things involving sentient beings change, not all consequences are automatic. We make choices about at least some of those consequences. Thus we assume responsibility for some of those consequences.
I was angry when the attacks occurred. What ‘message’ were the terrorists trying to send? What reactions were they trying to provoke? What reactions did they want from me? From my country?
Many of the younger participants on Daily Kos will not know this, but many years ago there was an interesting tv series we used to watch. It featured a covert team given assignments which often involved destabilizing regimes, motivating dissidents to revolution or assassination, undermining ‘enemy’ foreign governments or rulers by provoking reactions which would predictably undermine those governments or rulers.
They created scenarios in which despots or tyrants would react out of fury or fear in ways not conducive to inspiring confidence in the individual’s stability and maturity as a leader.
Can you think of any attack scenario which could have been devised to more effectively expose and exploit flaws in the ... 'leadership' (I use the term loosely) of this country? We were attacked by hijackers from Saudi Arabia (15), United Arab Emirates (2), Egypt (1) and Lebanon (1), so, in retaliation, we attack ... Iraq?!
We had the sympathy and support of most of the world immediately following the attacks. After the unstable, cowardly, bullying responses of the previous administration, all of that was frittered away, and the entire rest of the world (except for Tony Blair) understood it. The same thing happened within our country itself. From feeling we were all in it together, conservatives turned it into a wedge to divide us, and it did that. Terrorists laughed at their success. They still laugh.
One estimate I saw following the attacks (from page one of the 9/11 Commission) report, hypothesized that planning and coordinating the attacks cost between $400,000 - 500,000. Damage to the airline industry alone, in our ‘security-intentioned’ responses, probably measures in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Damage to our national economy cannot be reliably calculated. Cost of the wars can only be estimated, and that doesn’t factor in the lives lost, which far exceed those lost on 9/11 itself. How much of what has happened in the past decade was done to us, and how much have we done to ourselves?
I said I would write about how it affects me. I have resolved to focus my energy and attention on ACTING, not reacting. If a conservative or a life troll angers me, I make a donation or contribution to a Democratic candidate. Or I perform some volunteer function for a candidate or a cause. Or I try to provide a powerful ARGUMENT with the intention of making our world, our candidates and our causes better. I never give ammunition to our adversaries, I never give them motivation. I project positive energy, I try to do something constructive, I reject and repudiate the use of violence for sending ‘messages,’ without compromise or reservation. I do oppose our adversaries with all the passion and persuasion within me. I don’t think that will ever change again. And my resolve is far stronger than it was on September 10, 2001.
How has 9/11 changed you?
From virgomusic:
Over the past few weeks, as this anniversary approached, I found myself feeling oddly resistant to the whole idea of large-scale commemoration. I attributed it to my general contrarian tendency to sit out anything that strikes me as too insanely popular or over-hyped. But in recent days I’ve even noticed a palpable sense of dread buzzing in the background of my consciousness, out of proportion to my baseline curmudgeonliness. I was aware of a number of classical music events going on in connection with the date, and I felt secretly relieved not to be involved in any of them. Well, except one -- the day fell on a Sunday, so I had a church service to play. My priest and I had decided to make the service a 9/11 commemoration, but in our own special left-wing Episcopal way. I figured that was about what I could handle. I also plan to attend an interfaith service this evening at the Episcopal Cathedral, more to decompress after my own service duties than anything else. I really don’t want to be subjected to any heavy-handed “you will feel this emotion now” kind of event.
This morning while McDoc and I had breakfast, I turned on public radio, as I usually do, even though I knew the programming would be thematically... predictable. The first thing we heard was a Boston yoga teacher recollecting that day in 2001, talking about how she noticed a difference in posture among the students in her classes. It was a valid observation, and I think going ahead with therapeutic activities on that day was a good idea, but the whole thing still reeked slightly of privilege and self-indulgence. My husband McDoc put into words what I couldn’t as he asked me to turn it off: “I don’t want to listen to people talking about how special they are today. It’s like this country got kicked in the shin, and responded by killing an entire clan and burning their village to the ground.”
With that, he went to work at the hospital after dropping me off at church. We had a beautiful service. One of our congregants is a middle-school history teacher who recently picked up his violin after many years away from it, and he played the Meditation from Thaïs by Jules Massenet. My star soprano, an older woman who battles multiple health issues just to get to church, sang “Pie Jesu” from Fauré’s Requiem. Both sounded fabulous. The choir sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and it was all we could do to get through it without choking up. It was the choir’s first Sunday after our summer break, and even though I complain profusely to my friends about the cat-herding I have to do with my rather motley little musical crew, I was very grateful to have them back.
I had chosen “We Shall Overcome” as one of the hymns, which I thought was a deft stroke of simultaneous patriotism and pacifism. But I had overlooked one of the verses in our hymnal:
God is on our side,
God is on our side,
God is on our side, today...
In the context of the civil rights movement, it’s a powerful statement, but in light of the baggage connected with today, it made me sick. I thought of the quote from Lincoln, “It is more important to know that we are on God's side.” But what does that even mean?
(Now, I know that the mere mention of God gives some folks the vapors around here, so I just want to clarify that even though I’m a big-time church slut, I vacillate between agnosticism and panentheism, and I’m ardently Universalist. I just happen to dig old-school Christian liturgy and hymnody, and I have a soft spot for my homeboy J.C., whether he’s a semi-fictional amalgam or not. Sue me.)
Theology (or atheology) notwithstanding, everyone wants to believe they are on the side of what is good and just. But how can we tell, especially when we consider the whole picture: thousands of civilians and service members killed in the U.S. and Iraq and Afghanistan, on one day of unspeakable evil and over ten years of misbegotten war?
I don’t have an answer. All I keep coming back to is this: when that Jewish hippie from Nazareth that I’m fond of said, “Love your enemies,” I don’t think he was fucking kidding.
Here’s another hymn I picked for today that I feel pretty good about:
O day of peace that dimly shines
through all our hopes and prayers and dreams,
guide us to justice, truth, and love,
delivered from our selfish schemes.
May swords of hate fall from our hands,
our hearts from envy find release,
till by God's grace our warring world
shall see Christ's promised reign of peace.
P.S. I still think the best piece of writing about 9/11 comes from The Onion. Sign of the times, it seems.
From bronte17:
In lieu of writing about 9-11 and what it means to me... here is my TC submission for a combo post/Top Comment from mole333 that captures the day 10 years ago from a NYer who was there. In a day of many 9-11 postings, this one captures it perfectly. This Year Feels Differently to Me: Ten Years Later
I remember the day very vividly even 10 years later. But there is a huge difference this year. This is the first year since I heard the planes hit and smelled the ashes of the burning World Trade Center that I can feel some satisfaction. This year, finally, after 10 long years, Osama bin Laden has been hunted down and killed. Along with him, under Obama, more top al-Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured than during the entire Bush administration. For the first time since I heard those planes hit I feel like we are on top of the war against al-Qaeda.
Ten years.
From cskendrick:
We should choose to make 9/11 a day to remember -- not as the beginning of a dark age, but the beginning of the end of one, to think of this anniversary not as one more year of sliding into despair but one more year of rising toward the light.
It is time to awaken, to recall where we were going before the darkness fell, and set ourselves to that journey again. For the future can be a good place, bright and hopeful. All it takes is willing hands to come and build it.
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The TC mailbox was a little sparse today, thank you to all who sent in nominations. The community depends on each of us working together, supporting and uplifting the best in us. I am grateful for you all.
From gizmo59:
In SoCalLiberal's recommended post A Tribute to Mark Bingham: What His Bravery Meant to one Closeted Gay Teenager on 9/11, jhop7 reflects on what may be the real lessons of 9/11.
From sardonyx:
In Keith930's excellent diary introducing us to the wonderful singer Johnny Adams, Lefty Ladig writes an appreciative comment that ends with a truth that I must highlight here:
A true artist will continue making the music; it is what makes his life worth living.
In potatohead's thoughtful diary But Dad, You Don't Know What Being Black IS!, GenXangster has an equally thoughtful comment.
From brillig:
In Denise Oliver Velez's poignant After the towers fell, Kaili Joy Gray put into words what I've been struggling to express.
In today's Midday Open Thread, Patriot4peace shares what 9/11 means to him.
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Thanks to mik we can - until the site changes again - bring you Top Mojo! What follows are the top 30 comments from Saturday 9/10/2011, first comments/tip jars excluded:
1) It's easy to demonize health care for all by Steven D — 150
2) The more President Obama campaigns on by slinkerwink — 133
3) this is a textbook case by louisev — 127
4) That's the heart of it, isn't it? by sherlyle — 122
5) I think of the young doctor, too. by fhcec — 112
6) As a lifelong union guy, by lao hong han — 107
7) I'm sick of the response to 911 by pollwatcher — 103
8) it's all straight from ALEC by MartyM — 102
9) Deprivation of rights is supposed to by hannah — 100
10) Think I will. by sherlyle — 97
11) ((((nchristine))) by sherlyle — 83
12) This... by cai — 83
13) so, so terribly sorry. by agrenadier — 77
14) I was asking myself why I put this here. by sherlyle — 70
15) I understand completely. 9/11 is always a bad by mrsgoo — 69
16) Indeed. One of the great victories of by lao hong han — 67
17) When I see the phrase "economic liberty" by Azazello — 67
18) I think you should send it as a letter by jardin32 — 67
19) I have a satellite trained on her driveway by Horace Boothroyd III — 66
20) Republished in California Single Payer by Shockwave — 65
21) Lexy has a little sister. by sherlyle — 64
22) I'm so sorry for your family's loss of such a by nchristine — 63
23) Sometimes I think this is like porn to some people by Julie Waters — 63
24) I would argue that they are sociopaths and not by zenbassoon — 62
25) Bastards by BOHICA — 61
26) Republished to Income Inequality Kos by Horace Boothroyd III — 60
27) When People Project Their Sexual Feelings On Kids by bernardpliers — 59
28) Part of the problem, is that the aftermath was by trickamsterdam — 59
29) Wow by Sychotic1 — 57
30) Rick Santorum writes in verse? by BenderRodriguez — 57