20 years ago today I was having a wonderful morning. I was working in a new job that I loved. I think it must have been my second year there, and I was getting on a roll with writing in the morning before heading in for a late shift at work. The sky was a crisp deep blue, and it was a perfect fall day in the mountains. I was in a wonderful mood. I can’t remember everything from that day, but I remember that feeling so clearly because it was such a contrast to what came next.
I can’t fully remember how I heard the news. Something about a plane hitting a building. Maybe my husband told me? I got to work, and found people gathered in rooms that had access to cable news.
I remember my first impression was a small plane had accidentally hit a building.
The news grew worse as the day progressed.
I remember crying when I heard a report that taxi drivers were pulling the seats out of their cars to make room for bodies.
I kept picturing fire fighters climbing up the stairs of the building, not knowing that it was about to fall. Thinking this was something else, something manageable. Something they would survive.
I heard stories of people jumping off to escape the certain death of the building to reach the certain death of the ground. These are choices, moments, too painful to contemplate.
And I remember regretting, again, that the Supreme Court decided Bush would be president because I knew he would not respond appropriately. He would not engage in the international detective work and financial networking that could lead us to find and bring the perpetrators to justice. He would instead pound his chest and condemn countless lives to death to merely appear to take action (and not coincidentally, make a lot of money for military-affiliated businesses).
On the other hand, I was a bit grateful not to have to hear the faux outrage of the right wing if Gore was president, knowing their tendency to be supremely confident that there was a better way that only they knew. Little did I know all the horrors they would bring us by the year 2016, and that you can’t just wait for bad faith actors to settle down. They will grind our democracy to bits if we don’t push back.
And as I reflect on the sorrow and shock we felt at so much human loss and destruction (and that we now learn never ended), I am also aware that we lost 1,642 Americans yesterday (and 8,949 people worldwide), bringing the total to 658,865 in the US and 4,616,807 reported deaths worldwide, and that with Covid19 we also don’t know how many will experience lasting harm because of it.
In the weeks after 9/11, Americans wondered how they could help, and the only thing the petty leaders of the right wing could suggest was to go shopping.
In these pandemic years, we actually can help. We can get vaccinated. We can wear masks in crowded and indoor public places. We can do our part to reduce the pain and loss that keeps passing back and forth within our very mobile society.
And perhaps we can learn the lesson from the aftermath of 9/11 that small, steady, unglamorous steps are more helpful than bold performances of power. I can hope we might avoid the pain and loss that marked our time in Iraq and Afghanistan by seeking solutions that do not resemble video games or blockbuster action movies.
And if we are lucky, we may find a way to inoculate ourselves from the snake oil medicine salesmen and internet trolls who now control the Republican Party who could never conceive why anyone would enter a burning building to try to save another’s life.
reader. writer. 