September 11 – Treehouse Writers

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). Continue reading “25 Years After September 11”…

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks here in the United States. Many people will give pious speeches and talk about “never again.” Perhaps there will be a reading of the names of the 3,000 people who died in the attacks.

I wonder if anyone will talk about how little we learned from the experience.

Don’t get me wrong: I was profoundly affected by those attacks. I lived in Washington, DC, at the time. My sister and her family lived (and live) three blocks from where the World Trade Center used to be.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get in touch with my sister that morning before it finally dawned on me to call my parents in Texas. My sister and her family were fine and so was their building, though they weren’t allowed to go home for a month. And I explained to my parents that the Pentagon was actually in Virginia so that I was not at risk.

Though I worked about six blocks from the White House. I’ve always thought the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was headed for the White House.

Anyway, I walked home that day, all six miles, because I assumed that anyone attacking Washington, DC, would take advantage of the chaos in traffic and public transit to do even more damage. And then I stared at the TV for the next couple of days.

Like many people, I wanted to do something useful after the attacks. There was a lot of talk of organizing neighborhood groups that could help people in the event of emergencies. Those emergencies would include disasters and pandemics. (Cell phone use was not widespread in 2001.) Continue reading “September 11”…