Living in the shadow of a 9-11 that's been co-opted

Today is the fifth anniversary of 9-11.

At its simplest, this is the anniversary of the date that terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth plane, intended for the U.S. Capitol, crashed near Shanksville, Pa., when the passengers on board rose up and tried to seize control of the plane. It is a date that affected America as profoundly as Dec. 7, 1941, did.

I was asleep when the towers fell, after a late night at the newspaper where I was a copy editor. It wasn't until almost 11 o'clock that I learned from a neighbor what had happened. At the time, stories were flying faster than facts, and my neighbor told me that there were still at least four planes airborne, and the Air Force had been ordered to shoot them down.

Some people say the earth moved for them. For me, it was as though the world had vanished, and I was plummeting into the void with everything and everyone around me. I remember sitting with my wife as we tried to digest what was happening. My older brother flew regularly for his job. Was he traveling, or was he safe at home? A friend of ours worked in the New York financial district. Was he alive?

Even learning that they were both accounted for wasn't enough to pull me out of free fall. I was still in a daze when I went to work that afternoon and plunged deeper into the chaos.

Our own television set had stopped receiving signals. At the news room, the television in the corner kept flashing the same nightmare in a repeating loop, as jet planes crashed into the World Trade Center time and time again.

Every time I checked the Associated Press wire, there were more updates, minute-by-minute reactions from around New York and the world, details of what had happened, and lists of the dead.

I cried like a baby. I felt the fear of passengers on the hijacked flights, heard the screams and tasted the despair and terror of people I had never met. I asked myself over and over again what kind of a world we had brought our daughter into.

Five years later, I remember that horror freshly, but I don’t know what I am supposed to feel anymore. 9-11 has become so politically charged that it no longer belongs to us, let alone to bereaved families. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, some of the pundits used it to blast U.S. foreign policy, trade and hegemony. Since then, it's been invoked as a cover for warrantless spying on Americans, the war in Iraq, and increased suspicion of Arabs and Muslims.

And of course, 9-11 has been invoked to call people traitors and cowards for challenging the Bush administration's policies, and it has been invoked to accuse Bush of dishonoring the memory of its victims.

The terror attack on 9-11 have fundamentally altered the way we view ourselves and one another. It has become the defining event of the Bush presidency. It has intensified the emotion and the rhetoric surrounding immigration, and it has radicalized the political voices in our nation.

Some of those killed were heroes by occupation. The firefighters and Port Authority officers  rushed into darkness and danger to save others, not knowing if they would return. Others, like the passengers on Flight 93, became heroes when circumstance drove them to take the offensive against their attackers.

But I want the dead to be able to rest in peace rather than being dragged around as an excuse for someone’s current pet political project. I want the families to be able to carry on with their lives without constantly being seeped in misery.

A week ago, we barely thought of 9-11, and a week from today we will think about something else again..But for the space of this 24 hours, the United States and the rest of the world has what it needs to occupy its attention so that it is not forced to deal with its own existential meaningless. We do not have to grapple with our empty pursuit of success, with our obsession with entertainment and technology, with our lack of foundation as individuals and as a culture.

Instead, we can unite in a shared grief, and mourn the dead – both for what they lost and for what we have not yet gained.

In the meantime don’t know what to tell my children. I just want them to have something in life that they value. I want them find something worth believing in, something they themselves have chosen and committed to.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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