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September 12, 2006
What Stands Out from "What Stands Out."
Two readers included in their otherwise accessible (to me, that is) accounts a sort of comment that caused me to recoil a bit -- to slip off of the common ground that it felt like we were standing on. They were these two:
I was hard at work in my cubicle, and got up to go around the corner to ask a coworker about some code. He happened to be walking in the door from the hallway outside, and told me that he had just come from the canteen and heard that a plane had crashed into the WTC.And:I immediately thought of the Empire State Building getting hit in a fog many, many years ago, and assumed it was the same thing. He said that no, it was perfectly clear up there. I then thought that it had to have been a light plane. It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened, heck, somebody crashed on the White House lawn a few years ago. It had to be a lone nut at worst, in a cessna. But in the back of my head, I started to worry. Surely not. But could it? There had been that Egyptian copilot who crashed his airliner into the ocean...
I asked my question and went back to work. But just a few minutes later, he came back and told me that a second plane had flown into the other tower.
There never was any question after that. Things just solidified. We were under attack. I started getting angry.
I walked to the canteen, and watched the replays on the TVs overhead. I didn't get to see the second one live, but I've seen the clips, the stunned reactions from broadcasters on the air so many times that it feels like I have. I just stood there in anger, muttering "We're at war. We are at war." Thoughts of Pearl Harbor began to pop into my mind, especially when I came back to check again and the Pentagon had been hit. There were reports of bombs, and snipers, and it looked like an all-out decapitation strike might be underway. I couldn't understand why the Capitol hadn't been hit; that would have hurt our psyche far worse as a nation, but I eventually came to understand that our foes didn't really get that, and their one shot was taken down in America's first counterattack.
Perhaps the worst part was when I went to see my manager about something around lunchtime. I asked her how she was holding up, and by her cheery voice I realized that she had been inside her office all morning and didn't even know. I had to stand there... and tell her that it looked like 50,000 innocent people had just died, and that we were at war. Fortunately, they hit us too early in the day, to high up the buildings, and the evacuations worked relatively well. We could have lost ten times as many as we did, rather easily.
I sit here and wonder, five years later, how so many can simply forget or dismiss the cruelty or the evil of the attack.
I will never forget the sound of my father's voice screaming over the phone that the tower was collapsing. I worked rotating shifts then and was actually watching a movie. I had a TV, but no cable. My phone rang and it was my father, in Erie, PA, calling to tell me to turn on the TV. He was frantic. I think he only wanted to make sure that his sons were still alive, even though there was no possibility that either of us were anywhere near NYC or (later) DC. As he was trying to explain what was going on, one of the towers collapsed. I remember him saying that one had collapsed already and OH MY GOD THE OTHER TOWER IS FALLING!What nags at me about these two posts is not that they somehow deviated from the invitation to share memories of 9/11/2001 and veered toward commentary about what followed. Others who wrote did that -- sharing, for example, their disbelief at the way the Administration frittered away the feeling of national and even international unity that welled up after the attacks -- and that did not bother me. So maybe the only difference between the commentary that bothered me and the commentary that didn't is that the stuff that didn't was stuff I agreed with. I concede that possibility.I’ve heard my father afraid. I’ve heard him angry, even furious. I’ve never before, nor since heard him horrified. I’d prefer never to hear him that way again.
I carried the phone downstairs and knocked on my new neighbor's door. We had not yet met and here I was waking them up (they had evening shifts that day) wearing only short pants, no shirt, no shoes, trying to convince them to turn on their TV. I was sure that it wasn't possible that my father was correct. I was sure that as soon as I could get the TV on I would see something else. Maybe some sort of War of the Worlds thing. We became friends, my neighbors and I. not because of that incident, but for others.
The video of the attacks and the collapses I have seen several times, always recorded. I was doing something else when it was playing live. The collapses were shown over and over again in the typical TV fashion, played until you are almost sick of them and then they stopped, like they were swept into a memory hole. It was as if the TV stations imagined themselves our parents and suddenly tried to cover our eyes, to prevent us from seeing the horror that had occurred. It was as if they suddenly realized we were angry about it and were seriously considering retaliation, revenge, a reckoning. It as if we suddenly woke up from a dream where we had imagined that the world was safe, but now we knew better. Now we knew that we had to act. The images suddenly disappeared; our intellectual betters decided that they wanted no part of this. They stopped showing the pictures, hoping that we would stop demanding the blood of our enemies. They had successfully paper[ed] over all the previous wounds, but they were astonished to find that they could not paper over this one. America got its wake-up call. For me, the sound of America waking up will always be the sound of my father, screaming in horror, over the telephone.
But maybe it's something else. These two readers see in the post-9/11 world an American forgetfulness about the horror of that day -- and a media-sung lullaby to calm our anger and our fear -- that I just don't even begin to see or hear. Surely it is possible for all Americans to continue to feel the shared sadness, anger, and fear at the attacks of September 11, and at the same time disagree about how to respond.
Isn't it?
Posted by Eric at September 12, 2006 8:36 AM
Comments
So sorrow is an appropriate feeling to share, but anger and resolve are not? You should have included that in your invitation.
Posted by: Reuben at September 12, 2006 11:36 PM
Prof. Muller wrote:
Surely it is possible for all Americans to continue to feel the shared sadness, anger, and fear....
Reuben wrote:
So sorrow is an appropriate feeling to share, but anger and resolve are not?
I would suggest that Reuben has reading comprehension problems, but I'm afraid there's more to it than that. Angry at the terrorists? I think we all were. I didn't feel it on that day, too busy dealing with a world turned upside-down and looking for ways to help those we believed -- we had to believe -- were still trapped, in need of rescue and medical care. But in the days and weeks that followed, anger yes, white hot anger at the perpetrators of that crime.
But that's not the sort of anger you were talking about, is it Reuben? Not the kind of anger Sean and Big D wanted either. It's too limited, too narrow in its focus. No, better a free-floating anger, a universal rage that demands violence to slake it, that spreads like ripples from its central source. It starts as it did for all of as with the murderers themselves, then outward to anyone who may sympathize with them, and still further, to anyone who looks like them, and finally to anyone who doesn't share that paticular form of anger or the purpose you want to put it to. What a strange irony that so many New Yorkers fall into that last category, that the anger spawned by the attacks should ultimately be turned against those most affected by them.
Big D wrote:
I sit here and wonder, five years later, how so many can simply forget or dismiss the cruelty or the evil of the attack.
Reading that, I felt like I'd been slapped, because I knew he was talking about people like me. Forget? No more than I can forget my own name, or the room I'm sitting in right now. The memories are sharp and clear as broken glass, but there are those who mock and demean my pain because it doesn't flow down politically proper paths.
My anger has radiated outward too, from that attack to all attacks that leave broken bodies trapped in rubble, families ripped apart and entire cities reeling. Anger at bombs that fall from the sky or explode beneath our feet or come packed in suitcases and vests. Anger at those who count success by the number of corpses they create, and at those who don't count the bodies at all, but dismiss the innocent lives lost as unworthy of mention. Anger at the war-makers and terror-makers, whatever their cause or color.
That's not the anger you want though, is it? It's the wrong kind of anger, directed at the wrong targets for your purpose. I wouldn't mind that so much if you didn't try to punish me in such cruel ways, pouring salt in the still fresh wounds opened on that day and the days and weeks that followed. Why can't we come together to remember and to mourn, without some mourners turning against the rest, trying to drive us out into the cold so they can claim the gravesite for their own? 9/11 doesn't belong to you. It belongs to all of us, to those who lost homes or loved ones or just a sense of safety. It belongs to everyone left reeling by the attacks. You don't own 9/11. I have as much right as you to stand at that grave and remember.
One of the things I remember about that day and the days that followed was how much it didn't matter who we were or what we looked like or who we prayed to or who we voted for. Stripped of all of that we were all just human beings, burdened by the same sorrows, and those whose burdens were lighter could think of little else than helping those who had so much more to bear. I remember the sadness, anger and fear, but I remember that too, and I wonder, why don't you?
Posted by: Beth at September 13, 2006 3:13 PM
No comprehension problem here. The poster says it's perfectly appropriate to FEEL anger -- my point was he's bothered by people sharing that feeling with others, with expressing it out loud. Which strikes me as odd, given the magnitude of the atrocity that was 9/11.
Posted by: reuben at September 21, 2006 12:11 PM