Sunday, September 11, 2011

9/11

I am full of mixed feelings about the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The three major feelings are

  • sadness, much like what I assume the rest of the country is feeling, for the loss of life in 2001
  • confused nostalgia, for what it was like to be an American before 9/11, which is also the last year before I was in college, and the two life-changing events are inextricable
  • anger, for the ways the U.S. exploited other countries and cultures before 9/11, and the ways we stepped exploitation and war up afterwards, and the ways we've treated Americans and nonAmericans, particularly those with brown skin
Sadness
I remember every detail of September 11, 2001. I remember walking into 3rd period AP English, where I think we had a sub. I remember Kim Clay walking in and saying a plane flew into the World Trade Center, and no one knew if it was an accident. I remember hoping that it was. I remember turning on the TV moments after the second plane hit, and watching with my classmates at both towers fell. I remember spending lunchtime in the theater classroom, and learning from a friend that her older brother who I adored had just joined the Army a few weeks earlier. I remember being in 5th period statistics and having the principal call all classrooms to say we should turn the TVs off because it was creating fear and distraction. I remember we didn't comply, though we turned the volume down and did try to leave it off for a few minutes. I remember wondering if my dad was safe and sound where he worked in Elizabeth, NJ, or if he had taken his class on a field trip. I remember my mom signing me out of school and telling me my cousin Dana had just moved to NYC a few weeks earlier, but that all of my family in NJ was ok. I remember being glued to the TV, mostly to Fox News, for the next months. I remember being angry at my brother for saying we should just "wipe 'them' off the face of the earth."

Confused nostalgia
I move to Florida from New Jersey when I was 10. Every time I visited NJ after that, it seemed old-fashioned. Indeed, the area I lived in was new, mostly built within the preceding five to ten years, but it had a different culture. Florida didn't have pinball machines in family-owned pizza joints. It wasn't that Florida outgrew it, it's just that those things never existed. Anything NJ had that FL didn't seemed outdated to me because my whole world and the context in which I understood the present shifted, particularly because I was young enough to remember feelings and general impressions more than specifics.

I feel similarly about 9/11. My entire life would have changed that year anyway. I went to college in August 2002; 9/11 was the beginning of my senior year of high school. I turned 18 in 2002. Without 9/11, I surely would have become more politically aware and active right around the same time. I would have noticed the PATRIOT Act, and the war in Afghanistan, followed by the war in Iraq and everything that came after. I would have still been part of peace demonstrations in March 2003 after learning at a Bible study that the U.S. bombed Iraq. And yet, I cannot separate 9/11 and the culture of fear and xenophobia that came after from the natural change in me as I grew up.

Anger
This one is difficult to write about. I will be brief because I don't want to pretend that I know more about history than I really do. I know that for more than a century, my country has been at the forefront of encouraging violence around the world. We train, build, design, create the most lethal armies and weapons the world has ever seen. We remain, and hopefully will continue to remain, the only country that has used a nuclear weapon and wrought such thorough destruction of lives past, present, and future. This is the culture in which we live. How, then, could we expect to be exempt from violence ourselves? And after we are the victims, after we see first-hand what violence does to our own country, how can we believe that the way away from violence is to perpetrate more of it? Or that the way to unity is through exclusion, exploitation, marginalization, mass murder, kidnapping, xenophobia, and betrayal of our neighbors?

This thought makes me feel patriotic. The belief that fellow Americans -- citizens or not, 'legal' or not -- deserve to be treated as full human beings. I also believe that it is patriotic to say that this applies to all people. My trust in humanity, in individuals' need and desire to protect themselves and their families and their lives, extends far beyond America's borders. This is not a uniquely American characteristic. The culture of fear and violence that has been perpetrated by my country on itself and on the world has been a uniquely American venture, and it makes me feel sad, angry, and betrayed. My country is the people who ran into the wreckage of the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and the crash in Pennsylvania, not the people who fight fire with fire.

There is a quote from The West Wing that stirs my heart no matter how many times I see it. In the scene, the president is giving a preplanned speech shortly after a pipe bomb attack killed dozens of people at a university. He says this:

"...More than any time in recent history, America's destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedoms and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people's strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. Forty-four people were killed a couple hours ago at Kennison State University; three swimmers from the men's team were killed and two others are in critical condition; when after having heard the explosion from their practice facility they ran into the fire to help get people out... ran into the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America."