Sick of 9/11

It's been five years.  The day dawned a lot like this one, crystal-clear.  Coda of a perfect summer, a time of pleasure and light-heartedness. 

I live in Midtown now, looking west at the towers of corporate America.  The Citigroup building is a couple of avenues away; it is perennially said to be a target.  When elections are near, the armed police presence around that block becomes oppressive. 

The news media love to replay the terrible footage -- the plane crashing into the second tower, the crowds running from the tempest of dust and smoke.  Then the followup stories featuring the dead voices of young widows, and endless tales of the government's failure to help, explain, compensate. 

Politicians love to invoke "security" and "threats" and "freedom" and now "islamo-fascism."  Every year on this date we are subjected to the manipulative sentimentality about "heroes" (the cheapest word in America).  We are told to be frightened -- of flying, of getting on the subway, of taking a train, of someone different who happens to sell hot dogs from a cart or drive a taxi.  Of everything.

I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, then.  I stood on a pier in Brooklyn and saw the towers burn and collapse not two miles from me.  All of lower Manhattan disappeared in the toxic cloud, the roar followed across the harbor.  The water was glassy in its calm, the sky bright and clean when you turned away.  All traffic had stopped.  People had got out of their cars on the Beltway and stared.  Cell phones didn't work.  The radioes spread rumors, some of them true.  We waited for more blasts. 

The thousands of people around me wondered where their daughter, their son, their husband, their friend was.  Eventually, in small knots they left together, sick of the monotony of destruction, wanting to save their open terror and tears for their own four walls.

All the airports grew silent.  Silence in the skies, a new thing.  I could see Newark airport from the pier.  No movement. 

Then fighter jets and black government helicopters appeared suddenly, filling the sky with their anxiety.  Cops and checkpoints appeared almost as suddenly in that heavily Arab neighborhood. People later said they saw Arab kids dancing ecstatically on Third Avenue, but no Arabs were on the 69th Street pier that morning.  Somehow they all managed to stay home on a Tuesday.

I'm sick of 9/11, of the manipulations and the outrages committed in its name.  I'm sick of the sentimental bullshit about "heroes" and the image-building that incompetent politicians did at the expense of the dead, and at the greater expense of the surviving.  And I'm sick of the schadenfreude that the rest of America gorges itself on every year, in New York's name.  For one day.

I knew everything had changed for ever in this country.  I had no idea how far we'd fall or how deeply we would come to resemble our enemy.

Comments

[Lizzy]

"Beata la nazione che non ha bisogno di eroi"... (G.B.Shaw)

[Terry Hughes]

amen

[Stefano Frega]

Terry, your are free to be sick of 9/11 as we are to disagree with some of your moral and political judgements. I am sorry. Some of us, "highly-civilized" and "post-modern" Europeans, still think that today, 9/11/2006, "we still are all Americans".
With sincere affection,
Stefano

PS: Lizzy, non era Shaw ma Brecht. Entrambi però avevano i loro eroi fuori dal loro paese ... in Unione Sovietica.

[Terry Hughes]

Thank you, Stefano. I felt crushed this morning, very low and sad.

[RoVino]

Non so perché, ieri ti avevo scritto ma non è apparso il post.
Volevo dirti che non sono molto bravo con l'inglese ma penso di aver colto il senso del tuo pensiero che condivido in pieno.
Ieri pensavo anche a Gandhi, del quale ben pochi si sono ricordati.
E' indubbio che il 9/11 sia stato strumentalizzato dai media e non solo, è diventato il simbolo che giustifica qualunque massacro in nome dell'antiterrorismo.
Peccato che il terrorismo nel mondo nasce comunque da profonde ingiustizie.

[Terry Hughes]

Roberto, ti ringrazio e hai capito molto bene cosa volevo dire.

[Stefano Frega]

@Terry
Here some good reasons (at least for me) for not commemorating 9/11:
http://www.slate.com/id/2088025/

@RoVino
"Peccato che il terrorismo nel mondo nasce comunque da profonde ingiustizie."
Se si tratta di un giudizio storico-sociologico è semplicemente errato. Se si tratta di un giudizio etico-politico rischi che qualcuno - non senza ragione - ti definisca un fiancheggiatore inconsapevole.

[Terry Hughes]

Stefano, I appreciate the link. I hadn't seen the Slate article when it was first printed. I like this bit from it:

"The French had a saying during the period when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were lost to them: "Always think of it. Never speak of it.""

Seems like the best and most stoic approach for 9/11.