Author and Columnist
There was a thunder storm a few nights ago. Every rumble woke me in a frenzy, presuming I was sleeping at all, for fear that a plane had crashed or a bomb had gone off.
This does not abate for a long time. In a more metaphorical sense, I can't promise you that it ever has. 9/11 is, next to the pandemic, the event in your life -- in every American's life -- that inexorably changed their world. No one over the age of five or so when it happened doesn't know where they were. Life can be cleanly divided between pre- and post-9/11. (It is murkier to talk about pre- and post-the pandemic, both because there wasn't a clearly acknowledged start and, as of this writing, there certainly isn't a clear end.)
I now have students who were not born when it happened and to whom it is as irrelevant an event as any other in history books. We might as well be talking about V-Day or the attack on Pearl Harbor for how real it seems. They do not know that they have only lived under the increased militarism and interventionism borne of this. They don't grasp that things used to be easier and more prosperous for many people. They don't remember a time without that fear of the Other. While present before, it did not exist in this concentration and did not focus mainly on women in hijabs and Arabic-looking men with beards.
Without 9/11, politics would not go in such an authoritarian and nationalistic fashion. Donald Trump, I am sure, never becomes president and remains a punchline.
It was the first night since the tragic terrorist destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that I did not spend with Emily next to me. Her mere presence is evidently a great deal more assuaging than I gave her credit for.
I maintain that, without 9/11, you and Emily would not have remained together much beyond the Renaissance Faire. The tragedy and terror bonded you. You held to one another because you had been together that day. Not in the same physical place -- she was at college, and you were still home -- but you had a connection then. Though everyone now shared the attacks, it felt more personally yours. Emily brought a sense of security, a feeling that she wasn't going anywhere and could be depended upon.
Even when she is with me, we both break into a panic whenever we hear the shrill scream of a siren, fearing that it is the harbinger of our destruction. Emily called it "like the Balkans in my backyard," a title that I think it deserves. They have stolen my safety along with innumerable lives.
I'm not sure you ever truly get this safety back, but you grow used to lacking the certainty you held before the attacks. You were more innocent then. The most significant trauma you knew was the death of Kurt Cobain. You could not have conceived that anyone would be allowed to attack America like this, and that is how it felt. Not that someone tried to do it -- discontents were always trying something -- but that the government (through malevolence or ineptitude) let this attack through to propagate some agenda. You never much trusted the government, but this event put most of the country closer to being conspiracy theorists. This condition has gone from being the wacky guy in the foil hat ranting on the street corner to everyone's aunt or uncle on social media.
Acts of war to this degree are not supposed to occur anywhere near me. I am an American, a condition that states that I am protected from foreign malcontents destroying me because our government will not agree with their opinions. There is a magical shield on each coast that keeps acts of war far enough away that I can sleep soundly each night.
It is hard not to have an almost childish belief after twenty years as a citizen that this city on a hill was indeed immune to the chaos in other countries. The sort of chaos, of course, that America itself had brought upon them. As the self-appointed police of the world, we tended toward blind brutality, expecting no one had the guts to punch back.
This has shaken my world, a world which will never again be the same.
It never was again. Your timeline radically diverged that day. I can fathom the alternate history where this did not happen, where things remained relatively calm in the American psyche, enough that Generation X could be nihilistic without it being justified on every channel. Bush would not have won a second term. We would not have been stuck in an unwinnable quagmire in Afghanistan for the last twenty years. There are millions of other changes that would have occurred or not. Still, it is too heady to consider most without some inebriating agent to smooth the rougher edges.
But we should focus more on you. 9/11 changed you beyond keeping you in your relationship and making you otherwise skittish. Xenophobia and jingoism drove a deeper wedge in your world than might have existed so overtly. The American flag went from a background noise and classroom standard into a threat. The flag has transformed into something used to bludgeon people of color, occasionally literally. It emboldened some of the worst people you've ever encountered. People have nodded along because they forgot that their buzzword "freedom" meant anything more than "I am free to hate everyone else and do violence upon them."
If the terrorists wanted to tear the Great Satan apart, we did all we could to help them.
Thousands of people are missing or dead.
Around three thousand in America. As a result, a hundred thousand people, primarily innocents, lost their lives abroad in a disproportionate retaliation. They wanted Osama bin Ladin and, instead of pointing out that the Saudis did this, chose to invade uninvolved countries.
Cat's father died, though I don't know the exact details. Did he work in the buildings? Was he nearby? I do not think they found his body, but it was clear that he had not survived. She learned Arabic afterward, which was not a coincidence.
Seeing the towers collapse on television was surreal. Seeing it happen twenty times in an hour was unnecessarily cruel.
Wait until you get to see all the media, some quite exploitative, born of this day. Novels, movies, songs, paintings. Some of it is sincere, but you cannot shake the thought that most is a cynical cash grab by people spackling a lack of talent with an American flag and tower debris.
The world has changed, and for millions, the innocence of youth has been stolen away. I have to relearn how to live in this new world. People are trying to go about their lives, but I know they are as frightened as I am.
Hyperbolic, yet entirely accurate. You were innocent before this, in an "Adam in the Garden" sense.
The day of the tragedy, I called one of my teachers and informed his voice mail that I would not be joining him in class for fear that the apocalypse was occurring. One of the best parts about being me is that I can utter such phrases and be understood wholly.
I doubt he appreciated this, but you were not the only one (though possibly the glibbest about it out of fear).
He declined to give your classmates and you a test for about a month owing to sympathy. Then he sprung one on you without warning and raged that few of you did well. Specifically, he ranted that none of you knew that a cormorant is a bird (this being English Lit) since the animal is mentioned in a Shakespeare play that you skimmed. One must always stop reading and look up unfamiliar words before reading on.
Melissa was the one who informed me of the tragedy first, in an IM conversation starting with the word "DUDE!!!!!" I shall be putting this online shortly, as it is a piece of history. My history, at least.
This is usually where you begin the story when you tell it. You woke, you saw the word "DUDE!!!!!" You repeated it with a question mark. Melissa told you to turn on the TV. When you asked which channel, she gave a chilling answer: "It doesn't matter."
This will never cease effecting me. Ironically, or perhaps not, I think that this has completely banished any depression I was feeling.
Yes, your mental health has bigger fish to fry. Don't you worry. Depression will come back when it feels welcome again.
I feel like Anne Frank, in a small way, only I will never see the faces of those that wish to destroy me.
If a terrorist of this ilk wanted you dead, they would not have the courtesy of suicide bombing you. You might see the lethal means, but it might be simply a loud sound and then nothingness. This further makes you jittery because you feel that you could deescalate a person holding a gun in your face. A bomb will not be moved by soft eyes and argument.
Still, I strive for normalcy. This is primarily why I continue to attend classes. Had I my choice, I would hide in my room under the covers, reading optimistic novels all day.
You would not be alone in taking a psychosocial moratorium. Few people could stand unadulterated reality for a while. When not fear-mongering about terrorism, the media was cheerful pablum because we could not handle anything with sharper edges.
Several nights after, you will not find music on your drive. Every station played news or call-ins from people seeking something like community.
Never again will the sight of planes in the sky be wholesome to me.
It is largely anodyne now, twenty years later. You don't go on an airplane for the first time until after 9/11, when you fly to Knoxville to watch Emily compete in National qualifiers. She assures you that every groan and creak of the plane is typical, and you are silly for thinking otherwise. When you land back in New York, she corrects that she was terrified the whole time, those sounds did not seem normal or safe to her, but she did not want you to panic.
I fear a great deal for Americans of Middle Eastern descent. Many have been attacked.
There will be much physical, direct violence. It will become an unsubtly platform issue, an invisible foot on the neck of Muslims.
Melissa cannot pay her bills this month because she gave all her money to the rescue effort. She has turned suddenly patriotic.
This was always Melissa's way, taking things well beyond extremes. She was ruled by impulses and emotions, which might mirror much of what patriotism has become. She was more realistic about it, though. She didn't ignore the flaws of the country as many today are keen to.
She also had no more love for George W. Bush. You can only ask for so much. Even then, she assumed that he had some hand in it, as least as the most prominent representative of the federal government.
People everywhere are saying how this tragedy is bringing us all together. How can I believe this when I feel torn apart?
It did for a little while, the myth of September 12. Everyone you saw had been through almost unspeakable trauma. On the street, people would unashamedly cry, and we would understand. When we asked, "How are you?" we meant it.
I cannot say for sure when this changed. There was no specific moment but a gradual erosion until we didn't care for one another. It went beyond the indifference that we felt before the attacks, becoming something more active.
At the Ren Faire, there were people wearing shirts that marked the tragedy. Not a week went by, and already there was a bloody t-shirt?
That is the most explicit demonstration of what it means to be an American.
This is not a compliment.
Everywhere I see flags obscenely glued. Over back windshields, obscuring views. Red, white and blue ribbons twirl from the roof rack of speeding SUVs like pasties on a drunken stripper.
Performative patriotism makes some sense in the wake of such a tragedy, but most of it wasn't much more profound. They didn't really love America -- not as it was -- but they wanted to treat the flag as a middle finger at those who had wounded us.
Other countries find this nationalism baffling. Most do not have flags on every porch. What would be the point? They know what country they are in.
So many people suddenly care about this country. [...] Most people are either caught up in this new fad (how many Old Navy flag shirts can you count in an hour?) or as gleeful as the school bullies that they have a new enemy.
That hasn't changed. It was likely evident before the attacks, but you didn't pay it as much mind.
The thought that irrational hate is the reason thousands of people are dead doesn't seep through these racist bastards' heads.
If anything, the extremism of portions of the population has grown markedly worth once they could conveniently organize over the internet.
Oh, terrorists tried to take over the Capitol and overturn a fair election. They weren't swarthy Muslims but (mostly) white people radicalized by an anonymous online troll and demagogues keen to rile up their base, both essentially for the clicks.
So they ignorantly perpetuate the cycle of hate, beating and murdering complete strangers, fellow American citizens, because they practice a different religion and have a different skin tone. Yet they get deeply offended at comparisons to the KKK. They claim to be good old American born boys that are just trying to protect America from this insidious menace. (Did I forget to mention that in Saugerties, NY, an elementary school-age Indian boy was beaten bloody during recess, and the teachers didn't lift a finger to stop it? Menace indeed.)
Again, this only gets worse. When marching down the streets with swastikas in defense of slave owners, they still insist that they are nothing like the Klan. They are, of course, wrong, and they know it. It's all about trolling the libs, even to the point of openly affiliating themselves with fascism and racism. As Vonnegut said, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
I want to say I am proud to be an American. But lashing out with hate against the innocent is the problem, not the solution. This is not what it is to be an American. This is an embarrassment to America.
A bit naive. This has always been a part of America, but you weren't forced to as openly confront it. No one in your twenty years on this earth seemed so emboldened to act this way, though they plainly always felt it and didn't have the excuse yet. America is a country built on the backs of enslaved people and the genocide of the Native population. Hatred and fear of the Other have always been an American value, though ones that the better of us (who I badly want to tell you are the majority) wish that we could leave behind.
So I wave no flag from the antenna of my car. I do not wear red, white and blue constantly and loudly. I wore black for two days and I cried a great deal.
I cannot claim that everyone who did wave flag was only putting on a performance. They were grieving as much as you were, if not more. You didn't know anyone directly harmed by the attacks, though it would be weeks before this blessing was made so clear. Nowadays, a disaster happens, and we know in short order who was affected.
I get upset over small things, really. It irritates me that the fortuneteller's on Mystic's Waye at the faire never picked up on anything like this. I am not being superstitious or foolish, I don't think. I have witnessed them pick up on minute things they couldn't possibly know. Yet they couldn't pick up on the fact that thousands of people would be dead and innumerable lives would be affected on Tuesday?
You are anxious and oversensitive. It is not dissimilar to those waving flags in your face. Anything to feel more in control of an experience so far beyond anything we knew. You are all raw nerve, so why not take it out on psychics? They can take it.
Not that flying down would have come as a pleasant concept to any of us, but it turns out that we will not be going to New Orleans this year. Melissa was concerned (rightly so) that none of us could rally the needed funds to make this a truly memorable experience.
I don't recall this plan being much more than talk. 9/11 allowed people a convenient excuse for most things that they honestly did not want to do.
She is right that we couldn't have, though that doesn't stop my feeling disappointed that I shall have to put this adventure off for a year.
You have yet to go to New Orleans, twenty years later, or felt much of an impulse to go. Melissa traveled a bit, most notably to Hawaii with Liz (which ends their friendship, though it was nearly dead by that point). She never made it to New Orleans either.
Perhaps I will make it there one day in her honor.
A year from now, I will likely be nearly graduated from New Paltz, being wholly scared of entering this new real-world made scarier by recent events.
The world is a scarier place, one where everyone seems a few moments from high alert. It is not only fear of terrorists but increasingly severe natural disasters and what appeared to be weekly mass shootings. America is a mess, attacked on all sides. The political sphere refuses to do anything that might lose them a vote (even if it loses them more than a few constituents).