September 11th, 2020

On September 11th, 2001 I got dressed early in the clothes I’d laid out on the floor the night before because I was still dealing with a healthy dose of anxiety about having just begun the 7th grade. I recall hearing my mom upstairs in the kitchen and I remember making cereal while she rushed around the house, busily getting ready for another Tuesday with three school age kids. I remember us both half-paying attention to whatever morning news show was on as the host broke in with a report that a tower had been hit by a plane in New York City. As confusion began to settle in we both stopped what we were doing and we sat there at the kitchen table and watched on that small TV that hung in the corner of the room as another plane went crashing into the other Twin Tower.

9/11 has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of different people over the years and I suppose for whatever it is, it’s become an anchor point in history for many of the involved parties, and because of the large shadow America likes to cast upon the rest of the world, its hard to say what corners of the world have not been effected one way or the other by that fateful morning. There is the world that was before that day, and then there is the world that came after.

Earlier this week I awoke and I found myself grieving the moment my eyes opened. It could have been that we were hitting the six month mark on this whole pandemic nightmare, it could have been the politics of it all, it could have been the continued violence by police against protestors, or likely it was a more personal grief of illness and suffering, or the fact that our state and coast was on fire. It could have been any number of these things, or a combination of each.

But it was a heavy and more well formed grief. Practiced in its persistence. Today I wake and I grieve for September, 11th because I grieve for the men, women and children who lost their lives on that morning and for the families that were forever altered and destroyed. I grieve for our brothers and sisters in Iraq and Afghanistan and the countless countries across the Middle East who lost their lives as our military went all fire and brimstone into a region that was no more ripe for extremism and violence than the towns and cities the young men and women we sent to fight were from in the first place. We see that now. If you squint your eyes and tilt your head, its hard to tell the difference between a pickup truck full of members of ISIS on the roads of Mosul and a pickup full of red-billed hats driving up and down Interstate 5. The aimless desperation that gives license for otherwise normal people to do awful things is no different when you break it down.

I grieve for September 11th because I grieve for the permission it gave the powerful. I grieve for the months that preceded it. As fires engulf our Western countrysides I grieve for the Gore presidency we never got to have. The one that maybe pays attention to briefings regarding terrorist threats in the summer of 2001. The one who maybe doesn’t use the tragedy as a catalyst for war. The one that makes a plan to fight climate instead of a plan to fight humans for oil. I grieve for the new forms of xenophobia that that day gave rise to. I grieve for the continued dehumanization of immigrants who have come here just like our great-grandparents did.

It’s strange to grieve for 9/11 this year. By death count, we’ve had over 60 9/11’s in America since March. There are similarities, this current threat also appears to have been born in a cave somewhere thousands of miles away. Just like with 9/11 we had advanced warnings, we had opportunities to stifle it, and much like 9/11 we ignored those warnings. We ignored intelligence. We wandered aimlessly through the first quarter of the year as reports of a virus and finally the virus itself walked right into our lives. And therein lies the major difference. The difference of course being that it was no foreign actor this time around. There was no devious murderous plan drawn up on the walls of some bunker in the hills of Pakistan or wherever Bin Laden had been. Nope, this horror show we’re living through is American made. In our grief back in 2001 we allowed our democratic norms to be chipped away at in the name of vengeance and we watched as lies became more normalized, conspiracies more outrageous and we grew so far apart that when I say that we are living in different realities, I’m not speaking in hyperbole. We’ve come to an arrangement with social media and with ourselves where we don’t have to argue with facts or figures anymore, we just get to sit and feed gluttonously on the fats of whatever truth we desire and so there is no one single mission we are capable of accomplishing anymore. There is no hope in defeating an enemy with a united front. We are our own worst enemies now.

A couple years after 9/11, I remember watching George W. Bush walk out in front of a massive unfurled “Mission Accomplished” sign and looking back I suppose he was right, the mission of 9/11 had been accomplished. We were divided, we were broken, and despite whatever warmth the DOW and NASDAQ may provide you, I imagine most of you have awoken to the fact that America has been, as a whole, on a downward trajectory for two decades.

In honor of those who lost their lives on 9/11 and in the wars that followed, I hope that we can all contemplate what happened on that day, what happened in the years since and what we can do to put this country back together, because if boo’s are going to be the reaction to two football teams locking arms in unity and honor of the fight for equality, then we don’t deserve the lifestyles and prosperity that better generations than ours fought two world wars to protect.