Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks here in the United States. Many people will give pious speeches and talk about \u201cnever again.\u201d Perhaps there will be a reading of the names of the 3,000 people who died in the attacks.<\/p>\n
I wonder if anyone will talk about how little we learned from the experience.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Though I worked about six blocks from the White House. I\u2019ve always thought the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was headed for the White House.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.) <\/p>\n
I wanted to volunteer to do something like that, but I could never find out any way to do it. As near as I can tell, the upsurge in interest in doing something for the community was completely squandered.<\/p>\n
Instead the U.S. went to war. That seems to be all our country knows how to do. We\u2019ve seen how that turned out.<\/p>\n
And lately we\u2019ve seen what happens in a country that has no community spirit. More than 650,000 people have died in the U.S. from Covid (and that number is an undercount), and yet people are still screaming about having to wear masks and refusing to get vaccinated.<\/p>\n
We live in a world in which scientific research has made such progress that we can develop a vaccine in less than a year and people still won\u2019t get it, many of them because they have no conception of taking any action in the public interest.<\/p>\n
If our response to September 11 had included a great deal of community organizing, I wonder if things might have been better now. I wonder if we would have had a real public health response, a real community response, a real system for taking care of each other in difficult times.<\/p>\n
And maybe if we had those things, we\u2019d also be doing better with hurricanes and fires and heat waves, not to mention climate change.<\/p>\n
I have individual desires and dreams. We all do. But we also live in this world together. It is way past time we started to act like it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks here in the United States. Many people will give pious speeches and talk about \u201cnever again.\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,17],"tags":[327],"class_list":["post-1468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid-life","category-rants","tag-september-11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1469,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1468\/revisions\/1469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}