On most of the anniversaries of 9/11 over the last ten years, I’ve linked to a short report I filed for Salon.com within a couple hours of the attack from the streets in my then-neighborhood in Washington, DC. You can read it here, search for the word “bizarre.” It’s a page of numerous dispatches from different locations on that morning ten years ago.
I generally do not have much to say on these anniversaries. For me what seems most fitting is just silence. I have nothing more than the obvious to add to the discussion. I did read one piece that was disturbing and deeply affecting, a report that brought me back to that morning in a way I’d never been there before. You can read it here. It’s about the people who jumped/fell that morning from the Towers. Don’t read it unless you’re ready. It’s not easy.
Reading that and other pieces over the last two days, I thought again about what for me has always been one of the great puzzles of the 9/11 attacks. In my own life, I am often not slow to anger. And I’m very in touch with the human — though not always helpful — need for retaliation and vengeance. Reading these stories of people who were one moment starting another morning of their lives and the next driven by some mix of physical pain, shock and terrorized desperation to hurl themselves off a hundred story building I was again filled with that need to exact a price.
But there’s the problem. This thing of such vast enormity was done to us by so relatively few people. There’s a great imbalance there that has always made the attacks difficult for me to grasp and make sense of. It’s like there’s a void at the center of the storm.
The immediate perpetrators died in the attacks, embracing and thus stealing away from us whatever degree of punishment was possible. And while there were many more people planning, working money transfers and providing other kinds of support, still … relative to the enormity of the violation, just too few. It goes to a primitive part of ourselves. But you could hunt down and kill every one of them and somehow it still wouldn’t be enough.
Whatever you think about the breadth and scope of the terroristic strain of militant Islam, the cold reality is that this attack itself was pulled off by a very small number of people, for relatively little money and with no more technology than knives and a rudimentary ability to pilot jetliners. I guess their most powerful tool was patience and a free willingness to die. Millions may have sympathized or cheered. But they didn’t know anything about it.
My aim here is not to relitigate Iraq. And in this understanding of 9/11 I’m speaking only for myself. But I do believe this awful mismatch has haunted America’s grappling with the awesome barbarity of 9/11 from the start.
But that’s a question of policy. And that’s not what I’m here to discuss tonight. I’ll simply say that for me it was simply too much barbarity and aggression with too few to punish.
