9-11, Ten Years After

I should probably write something in honor of the multiple tragedies we now call "Nine Eleven" because everyone else is doing it.  It always seems strange to me the way people refer to events as happening either before September Eleventh or ten years after September Eleventh when we have a September Eleventh every year.  I pity the poor people who have birthdays tomorrow and know that now their birthday will always be a day that will live in infamy.


I remember what I did that morning.  I had taken the children to school, and I had to drop some old clothes off at the thrift shop, and then I had plans to see my lawyer to deal with some paperwork.   My husband had died two weeks earlier, and I wanted to donate some of his things to charity.  They had played a story at around 6:20 on NPR's Morning Edition about new teachers, and I had missed part of it.  I knew they would rebroadcast the program and repeat that particular story at 8:20.  I was in the thrift shop parking lot waiting for them to open, expecting to hear the voice of Claudio Sanchez, NPR's education reporter.  Instead, NPR interrupted its regularly scheduled program to bring us the horrendous news.  Having gathered my family around my husband's bedside and said good-bye to him, I couldn't help thinking of the families whose loved ones were taken from them that morning without warning, without getting their affairs in order, without any opportunity to make peace with each other.


We might focus on what The September Eleventh Attacks mean for parents with young children.  I would argue that although we might expect nightmares and emotional trauma in our current teenagers and young adults, today's toddlers have been spared all that, and we should keep things that way.  For those of us old enough to remember where we were on September 11, 2001, November 22, 1963, or December 7, 1941, these events were the defining event of a generation.  But for today's primary school children, 2001 is history as ancient as  or March 25, 1911 or April 12, 1861 or October 14, 1066.  We can't expect very small children to ever feel the loss of those we remember before 2001, not on a personal or a national level, nor to feel the connection many of us feel with others who also lost people we loved.  Let us not fault them if they can't get excited about all the memorial services and speeches, the flag-waving, and the rhetoric, and let us not use these children as an excuse to whip up hatred against people in other countries, nor blame them for being insufficiently patriotic on account of the World Trade Center's destruction.

How many of us ever consider the plight of the English during WWII?  During the Battle of Britain, or the "Blitz" as many called it, German bombers flew over London every night. Large swaths of that city were destroyed, and if you walk down the streets there today admiring the beautiful eighteenth century buildings, you'll see the random post-WWII building that doesn't fit into the cityscape.  London's urban renewal projects owe a great deal to the Luftwaffe.  We should consider the terror the English people felt in 1940 and the fear and uncertainty they must have suffered over the outcome of that war.  Some families sent their children off to live with strangers in the country, not sure they'd ever see them again.  Some spent many a night packed together and trying to sleep in the Underground stations, just hoping that when the noise above them and the all clear sounded, their houses would not be reduced to rubble.


When I got to my lawyer's office that fateful morning in 2001, he was watching the television coverage from the World Trade Center, and he said, "Now Americans know how Israelis feel."  We may expect terrible things to happen in other countries, but I believe the sheer novelty of such an attack on the United States of all countries was as much a part of people's outrage as the death and destruction themselves.  Yet since 2001, nothing similar has happened again.


For some reason, Americans have developed an astonishing willingness to milk a ten-year-old tragedy for all it's worth.  Somehow, I doubt that they marked December 7, 1951 with all the somber commemorations we're seeing now.  I would like our country to move past 2001.  What many Americans don't realize is that people around the world and even around this country face tragedy all the time.  We don't pay attention to the wars and conflicts being fought in Congo, Mexico, Sudan, Yemen, or to the drought and famine in Ethiopia.  The storms, floods, and earthquakes of a few years back may not make headline news anymore, but people are still suffering.  Even the small-scale tragedies that affect some families in our own cities, the grinding poverty, hunger, and homelessness, and the drive-by shootings escape our notice.  What makes September 11, 2001 special is that it was a day when the nation suffered an organized attack from outsiders, something we haven't experienced as a nation since the early 1800's.  Since 1814, we have made a point of fighting all our wars on somebody else's soil.

Perhaps it's time for those making all this fuss to grow up.