When Tragedy Brings Unity

For those of us of a certain age, it is not cliche to say that we can all remember where we were on September 11, 2001. I was in my first semester of my senior year in college when my morning class got cancelled. I had no other classes that day so I went out to the elevator lobby to start to exit the building. One of the maintenance workers was on a courtesy phone saying something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. From that moment through my bus commute home, I had an image of some moron accidentally wrecking a small biplane or Cessna and causing some minor damage. That all changed when I walked in the door and saw the broadcast happening live.

Any normal human being went through a plethora of emotions from sadness to anger to rage and confusion. But that day and for a short time after, something truly amazing happened. We experienced a phenomenon often talked about but rarely reached. We achieved unity.

Whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, white or black, woman or man, straight or gay, or any other possibly divisive construct either man made or biological, it didn’t matter. We all felt the sadness and the pain and attempted to rise through it and lift each other’s spirits.

We didn’t worry about things like what pronouns we used, what statues stood in what locations or the history of the nation’s anthem. We focused our hearts and energies on our brother’s and sisters across the country who were hurting. We donated our time, money and even our ingenuity to help men, women and children across the country.

Of course, over the next few weeks and months, people grew numb to it. Instead of recalling the events of that day that brought us together, we began moving back toward anything and everything that keeps us part. And like that, that time of unity faded into the wind and we got back to the way we did things on September 10, 2001 and prior.

It was a long time before I witnessed something like that again. It was early 2020 with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States that brought us another momentary revival of unity. For about a month or two, the nation came together in service of one another and in a common goal of helping those impacted the hardest. We found ways to supply lunches for school children, made masks for our neighbors and even helped people with their rent or mortgage bills.

Sadly, it quickly turned from that into a political game when some politicians in states like California, Michigan and New York used it as a political power grab and other states and populations began to reject it out of sheer rebellion. Ultimately, there was more than enough fault to go around on both sides.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could make these small blips in our nation’s young history that focused on a common goal and human decency into the rule rather than the exception?

I know the whole idea of unity is very much like the concept of world peace. It is a pipe dream to a certain extent. The world is not as they say something built on the notion of unicorns and rainbows. And it would be naive and childish to think it ever could be. But if we could retain even just a little bit of that almost fantasy level of unity we reached on those occasions in 2001 and 2020, and set aside those trivial and silly things that are used to divide us, can you imagine how much better off of a world this would be?