20 Years On, A Country In Free Fall
I started this morning as I have every year since that fateful day in 2001 — reading, remembering, and looking. Reading old stories of 9/11 victims, stories I have read so many times already; reading new stories as journalists seek out survivors and victims’ families for fresh angles and offerings each year; remembering where I was, what I was doing when the planes hit; remembering the looks on my children’s faces as they saw the second plane hit; and looking at photos, so many photos.
I have written for years that part of how I honor the victims is to not look away. Because, in my personal and deeply held belief, to look away is privilege. A privilege those people, caught in the wrong place at the absolute wrong time, will never know. I look to remember, to never forget the faces in the broken windows of the towers — struggling to breathe, desperate for rescue.
I look to honor those who plummeted to their deaths from those towers — whether blinded by smoke and pushed forward by the intense heat of fires — accidentally falling out and to their deaths, or having made the final choice they could ever make, to intentionally choose how they perished. I look because they deserve to be seen, to have their trauma and impossible choices honored. And in looking, each year I offer them my humanity as I imagine their plight as their lives ended in such unimaginable ways.
9/11/2001 — we all saw it happen. We all know where we were, what we were doing. We all knew that in those awful moments, hours, days, and weeks that followed, we were changed.
As I do each year on this day, I also go back to read the words I have written about September 11. So many words. This morning I reread the piece I wrote 9/11/2019. So very much of it stands to this day, so I offer it up again here, adding to it the traumas in which we now find ourselves mired — a complete fracture in the bonds of our society, a pandemic taking more each week than we lost on that day in 2001 (in the past 24 hours alone, we have come close, losing another 2,303 people to COVID), and an increasing rise in domestic terrorism as citizens prove themselves ready to attack their neighbors.
It has been 20 years since that nightmare unfolded in front of our eyes. And for a brief shining moment, we stood as one — one heart, one nation, united in the humanity we saw extinguished, in the raw humanity we saw exposed in one one another. And then that died. We are now a country in serious free fall. Those who fell from the towers that day had no choice. We do. And change must come before we hit the ground as they did, obliterated forever.
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It was the Kennedy Assassination of my children’s generation — the touchstone moment they will always share with their peers.
I remember where I was when…
It was a touchstone moment for us all. A morning that tested our psyches, pushing images in that surely must have been ripped out of a big screen thriller.
Only it wasn’t thrilling.
It pushed we parents into conversations we never envisioned having with our children. At least not on a current events level. Man’s inhumanity to man from a World History class perspective, sure. But not as an unfolding, clock ticking, while they’re eating their Pop Tarts discussion.
I remember actually being comforted by my youngest child. Shaken to the core at what we had all witnessed on the TVs that morning (my children walked downstairs to eat breakfast just as the second plane hit — they saw us frozen, staring at the TV, and in that moment they saw, too), caught in that slo-mo feeling of shock where your answers come too slow — your mind short circuiting over questions as simple as “Mom, where are my orange socks?”
Toby provided the first step towards healing. At 5, the magnitude was not lost on him, but he distilled the most horrible part — the loss of life — down to the most basic thought, “The people who died are OK. They are not hurting at all.”
He drew pictures for us, showing where they were, how they were. And a child shall lead them…
As the months rolled on, I remember how the people of this country were in a lockstep of fear, anxiety, and trying to regain normalcy, all the while knowing “normal” had taken on a whole new meaning.
Yet despite the rolls of duct tape and plastic sheeting that became staples in so many homes, I remember the feeling of unity. This country, at least in my memory, had never felt more together. We had been sorely tested, our souls bruised, our faces stained with gallons of tears, yet we were determined to embrace what makes this country great — our freedoms, our love of liberty, our belief that we are a nation where anything is possible.
We held each other up.
Fast forward 7 years to 2008.
An election in which 7 years of governmental lies, abuses, debt, and sadly, division came home to roost.
Suddenly, there were “real Americans”, “real America” — and many of us apparently didn’t qualify. While one candidate touched the spirit of millions weary from the past, yet hopeful for the future, the other played to the baser instincts of millions, feeding them lies, hypocrisy flowing like cheap champagne on New Year’s Eve, fomenting anger not answers, playing to fear, not fact.
Those “real Americans” didn’t win. Sure, millions of them voted, but they did not win, and so has ensued the worst devolving of this nation in my memory.
Is it because a half black man dared to be in the White House? For some, absolutely. Racism was, and is, alive and unwell in this country, and every person who is poisoned by it should be ashamed of themselves.
Is it because power was taken away? For some, absolutely. Losing doesn’t feel good — whether it’s student council, captain of the football team, or the Presidency. But kicking and screaming is not going to change the ballot results.
Is it because change was coming and change is scary? For some, absolutely. No one likes change. Dick with the status quo and people get twitchy. But you have to take risks to effect change. It is that simple. If those who have gone before us had not been brave enough, we would still have slavery. Hell, we would still be a bunch of colonies beholding to a land across the sea. Women would not be allowed to vote. And on and on…
Is it because we had given our brains and ability to reason over to a bunch of screaming entertainers? For some, absolutely. If your only information then was what Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck distilled for you, then you were guilty of getting drunk on the cheap Boone’s Farm of misinformation and spin. If you had abdicated your responsibility to think, research, learn, and care — then you simply needed to then, and need to now, get out of the way and should not act shocked when you are ignored.
Finally, was it because we had forgotten? For most, absolutely. But life is like that. It moves forward despite the worst things that happen to us individually or collectively. The sun continues to come up and go down, our days are taken over by the minutia that constitute a life, and we become bogged down in our own dramas.
That was only SEVEN YEARS after 9/11/01.
Which leads us to where we are today — TWENTY YEARS ON. Shouting, screaming, misinformed, filled with righteous indignation because we are told we should be, not because we actually know why. Hating “them” because they are not like “us.” “Them” hating “us” because we are not like them.
A former “potus” who topped 30,000+ lies from his inauguration to his ouster. Mass shootings with no legislative spine or morality to protect us. A planet fed up with our selfish disregard slowly destroying us as we quickly destroy it (spoiler: It will win.). Millions of MAGAts cheering and jeering in the face of a global pandemic, all because their orange god made COVID political, made masks a symbol of tyranny, called it a hoax all the while wanting credit for vaccine creation.
We see daily how completely selfish and devoid of humanity are so many of our neighbors. They prey on masked shoppers in stores, harassing us, coughing in our faces, mocking us. They threaten anyone in governance — from school boards to Senators — who try to mitigate the transmission of the virus via mask mandates, vaccine requirements. They throw up one excuse after another for not getting the vaccine shots. Hoax! We don’t know what’s in it! You can’t make me!
That last one is most prevalent. The toddler-esque nature of their behavior would be laughable if the consequences were not literally deadly. Unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to end up hospitalized if they contract COVID than their vaccinated peers. And if you are hospitalized — unvaccinated — for COVID, you are in shit shape. Hospitals are stretched thin, beds far and few between, and they are not admitting those who are not in the most dire of straits.
We remember and lament the 2,977 lives we lost on 9/11/2001, but we lost 5,573 in the past 48 hours and we just stumble on. Make that make sense.
Never mind. You can’t. I can’t. The unvaxxed horde can’t. All they have are lies and conspiracies and egos that they believe will keep them alive. Those won’t. COVID-19 laughs at their ivermectin ingestion, their Facebook memes, their misspelled posterboards. We laugh at them, too, because in the duh dot com of their choices, what else is there to do? We have tried reasoning, we have tried cajoling, we have tried fact bombardment, we have appealed to them as parents, we have appealed to their patriotism, we have offered them money — to no avail. So now we peace the fuck out, keep our distance, and watch them die while we do our best to protect ourselves from them.
It is depressing. 9/11 revealed how good we can be to one another. COVID has revealed how heinous we can be. How selfish, arrogant, filled with hubris, negligent of each of our roles in the social contract. There is a malignancy on the soul of this country and each day it metastacizes deeper and wider throughout the figurative body politic and body patriotic, throughout the literal body national. January 6 of this year showed us just how deadly is our current course. We watched as fellow citizens erected a gallows in DC, as they smashed their way into the Capitol, as they hunted elected leaders, intent on doing them harm. Decent society stared open mouthed at our TVs, just as we had done in 2001, barely able to process what we were seeing take place on our soil.
We have forgotten. We have once again lost our way. And twenty years of distance has allowed the mental breadcrumbs to disintegrate into nothingness, leaving barely a dusty trail back to where we were when we all knew what mattered.
We have seen how tragedy can unite us. Somewhere, those memories reside deep inside each of us. If we are Americans — all of us — then we must call upon those better angels of our nature who do remember, who can see the horrors, the inequality, the racism, the bigotry, the phobias, the unfolding pandemic tragedy all around us, and pull us back together once more.
Barack Obama was not truly their problem. Their racism, willful ignorance, and lust for hegemony were. Donald Trump was not truly our problem — he is who has always been: an unintelligent, self aggrandizing, repugnant famewhore who was embraced as the convenient stooge the GOP used/uses to consolidate power and erode our liberty, our rights, our place on the world stage. Our laissez faire attitude towards voting, towards filling the streets like so many do around the world, towards children being placed in jeopardy by their own willfully ignorant, unvaccinated parents, towards fighting this fight — those are our problems.
“The people who died are OK. They are not hurting at all.”
We are not being attacked from without this time. This time, the attack is coming from within. We are the ones who are hurting. Only this time, we CAN stop it before another worst becomes another tragic touchstone for us all.
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For those who perished 20 years ago, for those who loved them, for those who carry on today … for us all … we must do better.
