Monday was the 5th anniversary of the September 11th tragedy. Creepily enough, I had to fly on this ill-fated day – a morning flight from Logan Airport to Washington DC on American Airlines nonetheless. One of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center was an American Airlines flight from Logan to LA. I made the mistake of watching the movie, United 93, on Saturday. If I had the tendency to fear flying, this would have pushed me over the edge Fortunately, I don’t suffer from that malady. Plus, the flight was at 6:15 AM so I slept through every second of it.
It is amazing to me that 5 years have passed since September 11th. Once you reach a certain age, 5 years is a drop a bucket. Even at age 32! It is hard for me to conceive that my son wasn’t alive yet at the time. I once took Calvin shopping at Roche Brothers when he was just a wee lad, and I remember going to the butcher’s counter to buy some nonstandard meat that Corrie ws looking for. The butcher was a really nice man who clearly loved children and he asked about Calvin’s age. I told him he was 14 months or whatever (It’s so great when you still keep track in months) I then asked if he had a child, and he said he had one boy who was a “September 11th baby”. How would youo like to have your pride and joy born on such a terrible day?
On September 11th, my wife and I were in Rochester, NY, at my mother-in-law’s house. We were preparing to drive back to Boston after a funeral. Corrie’s grandmother on her father’s side – a very sweet old lady -- had just passed away and life already had a very sad pall to it already. Corrie’s stepfather had a brain tumor at this time as well. Everything was bleak. I remember sittting on the floor in my mother-in-law’s living room watching the newscast as it happened. I don’t remember if I tuned in before or after the second plane hitting the Second World Trade Center. It’s strange that I don’t remember that, but everyone was so sad at the time, I don’t think anyone felt up to tuning into another tragedy. We met Corrie’s Dad at a café for one final coffee and condolence session before leaving. There were TVs on in the café but they either werent tuned in to the news, or nobody was paying too close attention. Then for an 8 or 9 hour drive home, we listened to non-stop news on the radio.
We waited what seemed all day for the World Trade towers to fall to the ground. We listened to the carnage from the Pentagon. The newscasts were all over the place. The stations were desperately trying to figure out what was going on but there was so much confusion. They kept rapdily cutting from one correspondent to the next, some in New York, others in Washington, some on other stations desperately trying to put the pieces together – interrupting correspondents whenever there seemed to be a more important development from another location. Reporters were in the streets of New York describing wht they saw, but it was mostly smoke and confusion and bewilderment. That smooth gloss and commercial sheen that we are all accustomed to in all our media, whether it be radio or television or print, was totally gone. It was all unknown voices and jarring cuts and panic and nervousness and guessing. There was rumors about other hijacked planes, but it took everyone a long time to put together the story of United Flight 93 crashing into Pennsylvania.
You will remember that there was no official press conference while all this was going on. I don’t think anyone had any idea where the president was. Much later in the day there were reports that he had been whisked away to some safe haven and that he would be making his way back to Washington DC at some point. Corrie and I were stuck in standstill traffic miles before the intersection between Route 90 and the interstate heading towards New York City, listening to all this. The whole experience was fantastic and strange to me, and must have been a million times more “surrealistic” to anyone in New York at the time witnessing this happen. (I put surrealistic in quotes because that seems to be the trendy word for reminiscing about 9/11 even though I failt to see the connection between a terrorist assault on our nation and, say, Dadaist painting.)
9-11 was, for me, a very disillusioning event, and not because George Bush was reading books to kindergardners when the terrorist attacks happened, and didn’t respond for 10 minutes. (Sorry Michael Moore) Bush showed no signs of being Winston Churchill on that day, it is true, but my disillusionment went in the other direction. The next day, after getting back to Watertown, I called a friend of mine who lived in New York. I wanted him to give me some kind of perspective on what was going on in the City. My college friends are for the most part an artsy, and lefty set, but it hadnt even occurred to me that this worldview would be the lens through which they viewed an attack on the United States which killed 3000 people (At the time the estimates were closer to 5 or 6 thousand). I distinctly remember my friend’s main concern about the 9/11 attacks was not the geopolitical magnitude, or the human tragedy. His biggest concern was that, all across America, people were going to start picking on the Muslims. That immediately seemed like an odd concern to have at the top of the list. As time went by, the fact that he said that nagged at me more and more. I mean I wasn’t expecting any profound thoughts on the attacks. Certainly, this blog entry does not indicate that I have any profound ideas after 5 years of reflection. Nor did I expect anyone to be able to conceptualize and make mental sense out of the worst foreign attack in American history overnight.
What was I disillusioned about? I guess that at that moment I realized what ideology is. I realized that people have a set of ideas and core beliefs that they carry around with them which prevent them from responding to events with the appropriate perspective and level of humanity. I realized that “Liberal values” are every bit the ideology that “Conservative values” are. I realized that ideology can cause people to squander their “moral capital” on unworthy subjects. Of course, nobody humane wanted there to be a pogrom against Muslim children or Middle Eastern convenience-store workers the day after 9/11. But, to have the population of Muslim Americans on the top of your list of concerns, the day after 19 Muslim hijackers killed 3000 people and sent our country into a state of mass chaos, is wrong. It is flat out wrong. Of all the concerns and anxieties that one could express at that moment in time, the concern that shitty, racist, bigoted, conservative, Christian Americans would commit the sin of mistreating the Muslims in our midsts is ill-chosen. One needs to respond with anger. One needs to express outrage and sorrow. One does not immediately fall back on cliched Liberal views that American history is nothing more than a wicked majority mistreating the minorities. One should not have the moral failings of Americans in mind when an unprovoked attack on our soil knocks down the World Trace Center and smashes the Pentagon. That is a kneejerk, unhumane to respond to an event like 9/11.
And yet, we see it all the time. There have been endless variations of “we deserved it” in the last 5 years. I think that 9/11 shone a light on the biggest moral weak spot of the Left. No Liberal leader has expressed a convincing appreciation for the magnitude of the Jihadist threat, or proposed a reasonable response to it. I’ve lost touch with most of my moonbat friends from college, but I am sure that most of them would express a similar sentiment as my friend did.
Our political situation is such a mess nowadays I don’t even know what to think anymore. Was it always this way? or has the reverberating echo chamber of the modern hyper-media caused it to increase exponentially? I am a talk radio listener which is a difficult thing to be when you are doing business travel, because the talk radio hosts in other places always sound so horrendous compared to what you are used to. Today, I listened to endless rounds of babble in which Liberals accused the Bush administration of “politicizing 9/11” and the Conservatives issued counter-charges of treasonous behavior.
I feel bad for the young people of today who don’t remember a time before the Internet and other communications technologies turned this world into a Tower of Babel. How can they possibly be expected to achieve any kind of clarity on the world around them? My wife’s students were only 10 years old when 9/11 happened. Most of them were bored by the bombardment of media coverage and probably have no conception of how profoundly it has remade the geopolitical position of the world. Anyway, Corrie teaches in Newton, a rich liberal bastion. Most of them are probably trained by their parents to believe that George Bush is the real threat. Perhaps it is for the best that the class quickly moved onto a discussion of Frederick Douglass. African Slavery is a subject which their worldview allows them to digest.
