Still Standing

In August the rumblings started: The tenth anniversary of 9/11 was approaching, and the nation was in for a deluge of opinion and reflection and repeated recollections of the day.

On one level, it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, what would we do for the 12th anniversary of the event, or the 18th, or the 42nd? Why should the tenth anniversary be such a big deal? It seems arbitrary and a little useless. The past is the past, and we're still here. Why not focus on the future?

Then again, if we're still here to reflect on the lessons we've learned... and not learned... then maybe the past can be instructive, and maybe taking a moment to remember that strange and horrible day can help us make sense of what happened, how we responded, and where we are now. Maybe we can chart a more informed course into coming years. The tenth anniversary of that "new day of infamy" is as good a time as any for that, I suppose.

***

What I recall about September 11, 2001, is what a day of contrasts it was. As it was in New York, the day was beautiful in Boston, with a cloudless sky of beautiful blue. That gorgeous day was to be the setting for a day of horror like nothing seen in this country for generations.

The first I heard about the terrorist attacks was that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and I assumed that it was a small plane -- like in the TV program I'd seen only a few days earlier about a small plane hitting the Empire State Building.

Then events started to accelerate. A second plane hit the other tower. This was no accident. And they weren't small planes: These were big commercial jet airplanes. This was a deliberate and coordinated attack. This was terrorism.

But was it domestic or the work of foreign agents? The last time the World Trade Center had been attacked, it was the work of home-grown extremists. And Timothy McVeigh's heinous bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma still loomed large in memory.

Both planes had taken off from Boston Logan Airport. Who was on board? Any friends, colleagues, friends of friends? A rumor started up that the cousin of someone at work, a pilot for American Airlines, had been aboard one of the planes.

Shocked people stood watching a television that had been wheeled out and hastily wired to a small rabbit-eared antenna set. One fellow, sort of a friend, looked at me with bewildered eyes. "People jumped," he told me.

Out of the planes?

"Out of the buildings. The fires..."

The fires made the top stories of the two towers terrifying infernos for people who were trapped. No one quite knew how those people could be rescued. Then the towers collapsed, one after the other, and it seemed as though the situation was spiraling into absolute chaos.

Then more rumors circulated: The Pentagon had been hit and was burning. As many as seven planes might have been hijacked. Jet fighters had opened fire on a plane that was flying off course and didn't answer radio messages. A plane had crashed in a field -- it had been headed for Washington, D.C., maybe to hit the White House, or maybe to hit the Capitol building. Different versions of the stories proliferated, wild, contradictory, and frightening.

"You're as white as a sheet," a colleague said to me.

My husband was in Washington, D.C.

***

Even now, recalling those events, my heart's in my throat and a feeling of rage and outrage and incomprehension surges up. What was the rational purpose of all of this? Where was it going to end? The beautiful sunshine outside went unnoticed. A pall had risen inside of everyone. Panic seemed millimeters away. The phone system was completely overloaded.

It took maybe seven or eight tries to get through to the cell phone of my husband's boss, who was also in D.C. at the same meeting. I screamed down the phone line to find out what was going on where they were, but I got no reply -- just, "Hello? Hello? Who's calling?"

He couldn't hear me. The line went dead.

But if the boss was okay, then so was my husband. Calmer, I dialed again, seven or eight times, and finally got through once more. This time my husband's boss could hear me. I promptly informed him in no uncertain terms that he was personally responsible for my husband's safety and well-being, and they had better both get home intact.

My husband, meantime, had been watching the television also, and he told me later that he finally had to tear himself away. Staggering into a corridor, he gasped and wondered if he was having a heart attack. He wasn't; he, like everyone else in America, was seized with fear and apprehension and a grotesque fascination at the incomprehensible attacks.

And grief. Geographically, physically, the deaths and fire and wreckage was limited, but psychologically it was a shattering moment. That night I wandered around the flat, wondering when my husband would be home again now that all air traffic had been grounded. I sat at the computer to see what people were saying, and another shock greeted me: Instant partisanship had flooded the Internet. "You libs have blood on your hands," someone wrote on a message board.

That was when I saw just how we'd been hurt as a nation. Not with burning buildings and crashed airplanes, but by being set against one another in a moment of crisis. All it took was four airplanes and nineteen zealots willing to die for an unholy cause, and the world's most powerful nation was crippled from within.

We'd been on the path to national disunity for decades, and in the moment when we should have put all quarrels aside our differences were what seemed to come to the fore.

I was sick with the terror of the day, and with a feeling that there would be no true reassurance in the years to come. I wasn't afraid of the Taliban; I was afraid of my own government. I wasn't worried by terrorists; I was worried by the guy who rushed to blame "libs" for the actions of suicidally murderous fanatics.

I rather suspected that he felt the exact same way on the other side of the mirror that seemed to separate us, a mirror that casts opposing perspectives of anything in view.

I wrote a commentary piece for the website to which I contributed at the time. My editor slashed "Now Nothing Will Ever Be The Same" across the accompanying photo. But the truly hideous thing was that things weren't really so different. Indeed, things were more themselves than ever. We viewed the rest of the world with anger and suspicion, but we... we Americans, theoretically indivisible and egalitarian... we viewed each other with frank hatred and rage.

***

The media called 9/11 a "new day of infamy," a reference to the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, by the Japanese. That event changed the course of American history: Recruits flocked to sign up for military service, and the U.S. entered World War II. We led the Allies to victory, and the Greatest Generation was forged. We emerged a global leader, and enjoyed a national unity of purpose that gave us strength and moral purpose unmatched.

9/11 might have been a similar moment in time. There followed an illusion of unity, with the President making grand speeches and appearing in grand and comforting photos. But there also followed deepening rifts. Bumper stickers cropped up, praising Florida, the state where the recounts from the election in 2000 had been stopped, leading to George W. Bush's appointment as president. Somehow, there was a sense in the air that Al Gore, the candidate who had actually gotten the (bare) majority of votes in 2000, would not have been able to stand up to the threat -- a curious presumption that ignored both Gore's abilities and the fact that the attacks had happened on Bush's watch in the first place.

But reason was hardly the fashion at a time when, as a nation, we were so crazed that we promptly cashed in our civil liberties for The Patriot Act and set about justifying an impending invasion of Iraq, even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. In the end, we got Hussein... and the Taliban, ensconced in their caves and warrens in Afghanistan, proliferated. We lost track of billions of dollars as the war ramped up, money that simply seemed to disappear, and yet no one seemed serious about finding out what had happened to it. We made a fresh inferno out of Iraq and threw our young and our treasure into the blaze.

It might have even been worth the cost had we emerged from the fire newly re-forged as a great nation, as we did after World War II. But such was not the case. Did such lavish, colossal expenditure heal our national psyche? Did any of it unify us in a single purpose? Hardly: The rifts only went deeper, and the gulfs got wider, and while a credulous mainstream media declared irony dead, cynicism rose to supremacy.

So did greed. Somehow, as the war in Iraq dragged on, our fighting men and women fading from the headlines and all but forgotten, it seemed as though the nation was intent upon making a meal of its own flank. The collective debt soared to pay for a war that didn't tackle the roots of terrorism, and personal debt grew right along with it as a nation beholden to credit cards for a golden life turned to impossible mortgages to finance outsized homes into which to stuff fleeting dreams. Then came 2008 and the meltdown of the economy, a fresh round of pointed fingers, a fresh round of talk and panic and, close in parallel, apathy.

So now here we are. The wreckage has been swept up and the smoke has dissipated, but there are still two big holes in Manhattan -- a fitting memorial, given that out national unity is similarly tattered and pocked. In the ten years since foreign agents attacked us on our own soil, it's seemed as though we have been all too willing to keep up the abysmal work ourselves. Here and there are split seconds during which we stop to ask what in the Hell we are doing to ourselves: A gay kid jumps off a bridge, a Congresswoman is shot by a madman, bullheadedness that defies all logic and all sense puts a deep dent in our nation's credit rating and fiscal credibility.

But such moments of introspection are rare and evanescent. The nation grows ever more divided, with rich and poor drifting farther apart, political philosophies trumping patriotism, and religious zeal identical to that which drove people of faith to murder and airplanes into buildings edging into the arena of our country's public policy.

We've become, in other words, a version of those twin towers: Imposing, but wounded; brawny and full of might, but smoldering. It seems that we all wonder the same thing: Will there be another collapse? Will both sides crumble, catastrophically and unstoppably? What then? Will we find unity at last? Or will we fight, recriminate, and rend one another over every last scrap, shard, and bone?

That panic and outrage of that day a decade past has never really left us. That sense of harm done and vengeful fury is burning even now, but we've turned it, as we turn everything, against ourselves. Will this, somehow, finally make us stronger? Or are we destined to be undone at our own hands?

It's ten years later and we're still standing, if just barely. Terrorists gave us a bloody nose, and we promptly beat ourselves black and blue over it, and over everything else, and over nothing at all.

When a principled person of sound mind agonizes over ambivalence and "beats himself up," it's usually over deeply important things, and often the pain comes from wanting to do the right thing but not knowing what it is. Our national dialogue is cloaked in just such words, with both sides declaring themselves to be right and righteous. But the rhetoric has been ratcheted up to such a frenzied pitch that it's hard to hear the moral concern, much less the righteousness, of either side. It simply sounds like two long, competing screams. It sounds like gibberish. It sounds like disintegration.

It sounds, for all the world, like we have become our own worst enemy. If these are growing pains, they are spectacularly intense; if they are the agonies of decline, then how pitiable are we finally to become?

Is there still some good faith in the midst of the brawl? Is there still a clear blue sky somewhere above the smoke and affray? Are we capable, at this point, of regaining our wings, or are we dying in the dust?

This great nation has nothing to fear from its enemies. We are strong, we are smart, we are determined. But what a shame that our enemies might have to do nothing at all but watch as we do the dirty work for them.

Where will we be in another ten years?