So it’s been 25 years since September 11, and we’re awash in retrospectives, some of them even useful.
As someone then living in Washington, DC, with relatives in New York City who lived a few blocks from the World Trade Center, I was stunned and horrified, but I also had what turned out to be legitimate concerns about how our country would respond.
Which was, to put it in one word, badly.
We started unnecessary wars. We underplayed the dangers of the toxic air quality in New York, which has led to more people dying from the effects of the attack than died in the attack (and that’s not including those who died in the unnecessary wars).
And we undermined the civil liberties of the people of the United States. The New York Times has a good op-ed on that this week. I remember that happening in real time, remember feeling very angry about it.
The Department of Homeland Security – an Orwellian name if there ever was one – dates from that time. You have only to read today’s news to see how that turned out.
A month after the attacks I flew to Texas to visit family, traveling through a Baltimore airport that was crawling with armed members of the National Guard and being subjected to an absurdly long line for security. On that trip, I re-read two books: Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (also very relevant right now, though I find I can’t face it at this point) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
I wrote a major paper on Catch-22 in college. I’ve always thought that the major theme of the book was that Yossarian and his comrades were in more danger from what the powerful in our country were doing to get “value” from the war than from the war itself. That’s what I saw happen after September 11.
What I took from the attacks was that we needed groups on the neighborhood level ready to deal with problems in the community when disaster happens, whether that disaster is a terrorist attack, mass shooting, a “natural” disaster, or something else. I kept looking for government support for organizing such things – a way to get supplies, tools, training – but found nothing.
My desire to do something intensified with the Anthrax attacks that killed postal workers in Washington, but again, there was nothing in the way of support.
A lot of young people enlisted in the military only to get sacrificed in the unnecessary wars instead of defending the country. But there was nothing for civilians to do except “go shopping” (Junior Bush was such a fool).
I saw someone observe that September 11 was the last time the country was united. But even then the country didn’t feel all that united to me.
It’s no surprise that when it came to the pandemic – another time when we should have been united – that things fell apart even more. Yes of course the government in power when Covid hit was even worse than that on September 11 – something I wouldn’t have though possible 25 years ago – but that was compounded by the fact that we have so few ways to unite.
Mutual aid and informal communities and nonprofit groups all come together to help in these situations, but we do not have in place the kind of systems that could make those things more effective. Go Fund Mes are not a replacement for community-focused public health workers.
I remain horrified by the September 11 attacks on our country. I remain awed by the firefighters in particular as well as the people on the scene who did their best to respond despite bad leadership. And I think we as a country did have to respond to such terrorism.
But I also remain horrified by school and other mass shootings, about which we’ve done nothing. I’m appalled by our response to so-called natural disasters that are only intensifying with climate change. And frankly I am gutted by the fact that we have done so little in the wake of the pandemic.
Everything is all on each of us individually to protect ourselves despite the fact that attacks, disasters, and pandemics are all things that require a community response.
For me personally, September 11 was a disaster way too close to home, one that made me more aware of both the dangers of the world and the failings of my government. Both of those things seem to have become worse over the past 25 years.
I hope we’ll do better in the next 25. I’m using hope as Rebecca Solnit does, not as Pollyannaish dreams, but as a guidepost. There are good things happening even in this dark times. If we stay the course, we might make it possible for them to prevail.
It’ll be shaky, of course. It’s always going to be shaky. But I’m going to keep hoping all the same.
When we returned to our neighborhood, way too soon, after 9/11, I put a poster board on an outside wall and asked people to write supportive things. (Already workers were digging into the ruins. Already tourists were coming to view the ruins.) instead, people wrote militaristic things, drew pictures of bombs. I took it down.
That breaks my heart.
We were still living in NYC that day, and for another two years after. While I appreciated the sympathy that came to us from all over the world right after, that sympathy turned… weird. Going to Massachusetts to visit my father, I saw billboards that said something on the order of “We are all New Yorkers.” No, you are not. At the same time that I understood and appreciated the desire to claim solidarity and to help, that desire seemed to me to morph into something like “well, us too! they attacked ME too!” And that felt (to me) like the root of a lot of the really bad decisions we made as a country in the wake of the attack. Powerful people with agendas were allowed start wars and fan racist response and create many of the problems we’re living with today. I have been tracking the groundswell of opinion–as near as I can tell, mostly from people living outside NYC–that Zohran Mamdani should not participate in today’s commemorative ceremonies because he’s Muslim, with horror. He’s the mayor. He has shown himself to be a thoughtful, compassionate human. That appears to be one of 9/11’s legacies, and somewhere Osama bin Laden is laughing his ass off.
That’s a very good point about how the desire to claim solidarity morphed into the desire for violent responses. One thing I noticed in visiting Texas a month afterwards was that people there were not really emotionally affected by the whole thing, whereas I was still somewhat in shock.
It’s especially disgusting the Giuliani said Mamdani shouldn’t be there. We are lucky to have Mamdani as mayor.
If anyone shouldn’t be there, it’s Giuliani, who, even if you credit him with anything he did on September 11 (and I don’t), has been a major factor in undermining our country in recent years. Mamdani is doing an amazing job as mayor. I would love it if the mayor of Oakland and a hundred other cities would shake things up that much.
I knew you would be a Catch 22 and Sinclair Lewis fan, Nancy.. I was ten blocks away from the Murrah bombing on my way downtown to work. Many of us in OKC have a bond with the 9/11 witnesses and rescuers. The senseless of it all. Like so much violent desth in the world.
It must have been awful being so close to the Murrah bombing. Of course it would feel so similar, so horrific, and so senseless.
My mother introduced me to Sinclair Lewis and of course Catch-22 was a popular book when we were in college.