In historical terms, 9/11 was just yesterday, perhaps a week ago. But in what we might call ‘news terms’ it’s now something like ancient history. Even the bloody shirt crowd who got in the habit of using the annual memorials and remembrances to beat down any questioning of the “War on Terror” or any other aspect of the country’s post-9/11 footing seem to have lost some of the appetite for it.
And for those who never bought into the politics of 9/11, again, for lack of a better word, there’s a element of rejection to any further commemoration. I can understand both trends. And both seem healthy in their own way. What it all reflects is that almost from the beginning there’s been a clear and I would say growing difference between 9/11 and 9/11ism – and by the latter I mean the whole mix of activism, propaganda, politicization and advocacy that grew up around the events in question.
I don’t mean to stigmatize all of that, though you’d be right to assume that I’m generally pretty skeptical about it. Because obviously this was a massive event and it makes sense that the country needed to have pretty robust conversation about what it meant and how to defend ourselves against something like that or – God forbid – something worse happening again. But still, 9/11ism, of which we might say former Mayor Rudy Giuliani became the Patron Saint.
This much we all know, whichever side of the political divide we find ourselves on. But I’ve got a certain perspective on it from living in New York, specifically Lower Manhattan, little more than a mile from where this actually happened. I want to say right away that I did not live here when it happened. I lived in Washington and got some immediate sense of the day’s events there (here’s some on the streets reporting I did from Washington that morning – scroll down to my name.) But I only moved here in 2004.
My wife, on the other hand, worked in one of the buildings directly adjacent to the Towers. And when the attack happened she was literally in a subway car under the Towers.
Remember, there was a major subway terminal basically right at Ground Zero. So as events were beginning to unfold, MTA operators simply took the trains that were on that path and kept them going under the Towers without stopping and let the riders out down at the tip of Manhattan.
Needless to say, they didn’t tell the riders what was happening. Probably they didn’t quite know what was happening themselves. So my now-wife, along with many others, trekked north, slowly making sense of what was happening, realizing going to work was out of the question, and trying to figure out where to go. Along with many others, she saw the people jumping, falling (who really knows?) out of the buildings and landing with instant deaths hundreds of feet below, the collapse of the buildings, the trekking masses on foot, the choking dust.
Obviously, compared to others, neither of us were among those terribly affected. But for her – and my wife isn’t a very political person at all – this was a very immediate, personal, traumatic event. And I mention her experience because, even though she was very up close, I think hers is representative in some way of New Yorkers in general.
Last year on some social media channel (I can’t actually remember which) I posted some photos I took of the shaft of light memorial. They try it out in advance of 9/11. So it actually happens over a few days. It’s powerful and intense to see. Beautiful but also terrible and haunting.
I got a lot of feedback from people who basically said, “Can’t we be done with this?” “Why are we still harping on this?”
I get it. On a number of levels I agree with it. On the one hand there’s 9/11ism. But on another, there’s the simple fact that a healthy, dynamic society doesn’t spend too much time looking back. Like a shark, a society has to keep moving forward to live. Or to paraphrase Bob Dylan, a society not busy being born is busy dying. But that’s not the entirety of the story.
As time goes by, the cleavage between 9/11 and 9/11ism becomes greater and perhaps nowhere greater than here where it happened. Here it’s not – or perhaps not only – a political cudgel or the opening shot in the global derp war against “Islamofascism”. It’s not just any of the politicizations, high or low, good or bad. It’s also the equivalent of a massive bombing that tore apart the landscape of the city, killed a lot of people and was just a profound trauma. If a bomb went off in your town and killed a few thousand people and knocked down two massive buildings it would be a pretty big deal too.
It sounds funny arguing for the significance of 9/11. On so many levels, we’ve had quite enough of it. We’re now apparently forever stuck with this phrase “homeland security” – where to me, ‘homeland’, the concept of it, the word itself is just a distasteful foreign and vaguely authoritarian import. And I hasten to add again, I wasn’t here. I was living in Washington.
But I have lived here for ten years. So I’ve been able to observe the different nature of what it means for those who live here and particularly those who did live here at the time. It’s different. And it’s a thing. And it will be for a very long time.
