I was at an early spring party, a club on a deck overlooking the Hudson river, well north in Manhattan. We were talking about superhero movies, my friend whose son went to see the new Spider-Man movie. He liked it.
"I missed the Captain America movie. I liked the first one."
"Yeah. I heard it was good."
"New Godzilla movie out."
"Yeah, only this time he tears up the west coast, not New York."
"I think the last superhero movie I saw was the last Superman movie - "
"Man of Steel?"
"Yeah, it was good, good."
" I liked it, but it reminded me too much of 9/11."
"How so?"
"The dust, the destruction. The scenes where they attack the city."
"I though War of the Worlds was the first movie about 9/11."
I thought, despite its plot, it captured the fear, the inexplicable randomness of thousands of people, vaporized before our eyes, the sky filled with dust, so many fleeing in terror.
"Yeah, yeah I can see that."
"I'm not ready to go to the museum, the memorial downtown."
"Yeah, me neither."
"I don't need a reminder, I remember it."
"My niece asked me about it. She's ten, she was surprised it happened before she was born."
"Yeah?"
"She thought, 9/11 meant the year 2011."
Chuckling.
"She asked me what I was doing that day and, I'm OK talking about it, I told her, but I was surprised at how emotional I felt."
"Yeah."
Moments.
"So new new X-Men is coming out. I liked the last one."
"It's like, a prequel to the sequels."
"A se-pre-quel I guess."
"Yeah. "
"I'm gonna grab another beer."
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 9/11. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Saturday, September 10, 2011
9-10-11
I want Monday to arrive.
Monday, 9-12-11, the day after the Tenth Anniversary.
I have mixed feelings about the ongoing memorialization. I recall that five years ago, five years felt like the right amount of time to have let things pass. That may be easier for me to say than for some, given I knew no victims. However, I live in NYC, and I lived here at the time of the attacks on the WTC. I know that the only way forward is away from the past.
To this day, I still switch channels when footage of the actual crash and collapse appear on screen. In the past two weeks there has been a cornucopia of specials on TV, of magazine covers, of online interactive features allowing one to dive into hitherto unknown details of "that fateful day". I want none of it. That fateful day was enough.
I have a well of memories from that day. I had just started working at a private school in Manhattan. After being laid off from my old job (there was a recession, remember) I had temped at the school for about a month before while the administration waited for a new director to start that week. September 11 was the first day of school, the first day after Labor Day, and also a primary election day in NYC. The building was flooded with children (a new experience in the workplace for me) and the normal chaos and confusion of a first day back at school was in the air.
I was replacing a network cable in a teacher's classroom. She was finding the internet to be slow; as it turns out, she had been trying to go to the New York Times website to find out who she should vote for in the primary right about the time the NYT and every other news website were being inundated with requests. I called downstairs for a new cable, and went down the elevator. When I got to our office, the truth was beginning to come out.
In short order, classes were cancelled and the job of all adults came to supervising the children while their parents or their agents came to pick up kids from school. Several kids lost a parent; at least one lost both; everyone knew someone who was directly or indirectly affected. In the weeks to come, we would learn how to shelter in place, how to evacuate to a nearby church, how to seal the windows, and be required to show identify cards on entry. It's no small feat to march 1200 children across the Upper East Side, or to get 200 educated adults to display an ID badge to come to work.
When we memorialize, we remember and mourn the dead. Three thousand people is not insignificant; three thousand civilians, three thousand all at once.The destruction of two of the world's tallest buildings and the ancillary damage to the area was hugely traumatic: cordoned off for days, power out, communications down, an entire civic center obliterated, restored only years later through tax incentives and litigation. And let's not forget the Pentagon - 9/11 also featured a direct attack on on global military command center, the building housing the bureaucracy that manages our army, navy, air force, and marine services.
I've come to agree with commentators who put the attacks in a larger context across the past ten years, pointing out other military and political events that dwarf the net effect of 9/11. The rise of China, the rise of Facebook, the global economic collapse with roots in the response to the recession of 2001 - all of these things have become more pressing concerns in the second five years since we marked the first five years.
Yet, while it's important for our political leaders to be aware of these changes, for the average person, this notation trivializes the experience. It may be true that in terms of preventable deaths, smoking kills more people annually than terrorism in the developed world, but that doesn't compare the terror, the anger, the feeling of helplessness we all felt on that day and in the years that followed. China's rise may be a threat, but it isn't killing Americans. Facebook - a commercial example of the marshaling of hundreds of millions of people - is similarly non-lethal, and has even come in handy when criminal-minded users collude through it online.
When 9/11 rolls around, I don't remember the attacks so much, other than having gone out on the roof of the school with a co-worker and watched the smoke billowing downtown. I remember the days and weeks after, days without work, days of busy signals, days of the mayor encouraging us to keep shopping. Weeks of no commercial flights (restored, fortunately, just in time for me to attend my brother's wedding in Wisconsin). Humvees in Manhattan, attack helicopters over the Hudson, security perimeters and a light dust that permeated the air for days. Eventually came the habituation to exclude certain subway and bus lines if they intersected the World Trade Center, still clearly indicated on yet-to-be updated maps.
We didn't know if there would be another attack. There had been four planes at once, couldn't there be more? What about ships, or trains, or trucks filled with fertilizer? Then there was the anthrax scare, as a biological weapon and cheap counterfeits of it started showing up in the mail. We don't seem to remember that anymore. The economy was in recession, in the wake of financial fraud and over-leveraged investing (sound familiar?). In short order we would invade one country, and then another, spreading American notions of freedom if not friendship, sparing no expense for our adventures abroad.
What the hell happened, that caused the US to go off track so badly? What would we be arguing about without 9/11? A sucker punch to a global hegemon, the flailing of a cyclops against a jihadi Odysseus. Knowing now what we did not know then, what do we do next?
September 11, 2001 was a day of fear. A day of loss, to be sure, and the dead deserve to be mourned by their loved ones. But for the rest of us, haven't we already spent our fear? Hasn't the terror and confusion of that day been replaced with new anxieties? For some, September 15, 2008 (when Lehman Brothers wen bankrupt) was as terrifying and confusing as 9/11. If a college sophomore in Syracuse saw 9/11 on TV, graduated, went to law school and ended up working in finance in 2008, which event would be more palpable?
What exactly are we memorializing? For me, 9/11 has a bifurcated purpose: on the one hand, remembering the dead, on the other, reminding us all of how afraid we should be. Yet, to the latter point, it aims in the wrong direction.
For myself, the anniversary of 9/11 is a time to memorialize the living. It is a time to remember the chaos of that day and the weeks that followed. It is easy in hindsight to see what we might have done differently, but at the time, who knew? On Wall Street and the Pentagon, in the homes of the passengers' families, across the United States, no one knew what was going on. We turned to our leaders, only to eventually realize they didn't know either. We have argued for and against war in Afghanistan and Iraq, whether or not to bailout the financial, automotive, and airline industries (bet you forgot about that one too).
Tomorrow, I'm sitting this one out. I'm avoiding television, and staying as far away from downtown as I can. I'll clean my apartment; watch a movie, maybe call my family as I often do on a Sunday. I don't need a special day to remember what happened; I can summon those spirits any time during the year. I'm going to think of my brothers, and how they're managing their journeys into adulthood; my niece and nephew, who have grown up largely after that date. In short I'm going to look towards the future, because that is the the only thing left to be written for me. I'm done with the past.
Monday, 9-12-11, the day after the Tenth Anniversary.
I have mixed feelings about the ongoing memorialization. I recall that five years ago, five years felt like the right amount of time to have let things pass. That may be easier for me to say than for some, given I knew no victims. However, I live in NYC, and I lived here at the time of the attacks on the WTC. I know that the only way forward is away from the past.
To this day, I still switch channels when footage of the actual crash and collapse appear on screen. In the past two weeks there has been a cornucopia of specials on TV, of magazine covers, of online interactive features allowing one to dive into hitherto unknown details of "that fateful day". I want none of it. That fateful day was enough.
I have a well of memories from that day. I had just started working at a private school in Manhattan. After being laid off from my old job (there was a recession, remember) I had temped at the school for about a month before while the administration waited for a new director to start that week. September 11 was the first day of school, the first day after Labor Day, and also a primary election day in NYC. The building was flooded with children (a new experience in the workplace for me) and the normal chaos and confusion of a first day back at school was in the air.
I was replacing a network cable in a teacher's classroom. She was finding the internet to be slow; as it turns out, she had been trying to go to the New York Times website to find out who she should vote for in the primary right about the time the NYT and every other news website were being inundated with requests. I called downstairs for a new cable, and went down the elevator. When I got to our office, the truth was beginning to come out.
In short order, classes were cancelled and the job of all adults came to supervising the children while their parents or their agents came to pick up kids from school. Several kids lost a parent; at least one lost both; everyone knew someone who was directly or indirectly affected. In the weeks to come, we would learn how to shelter in place, how to evacuate to a nearby church, how to seal the windows, and be required to show identify cards on entry. It's no small feat to march 1200 children across the Upper East Side, or to get 200 educated adults to display an ID badge to come to work.
When we memorialize, we remember and mourn the dead. Three thousand people is not insignificant; three thousand civilians, three thousand all at once.The destruction of two of the world's tallest buildings and the ancillary damage to the area was hugely traumatic: cordoned off for days, power out, communications down, an entire civic center obliterated, restored only years later through tax incentives and litigation. And let's not forget the Pentagon - 9/11 also featured a direct attack on on global military command center, the building housing the bureaucracy that manages our army, navy, air force, and marine services.
I've come to agree with commentators who put the attacks in a larger context across the past ten years, pointing out other military and political events that dwarf the net effect of 9/11. The rise of China, the rise of Facebook, the global economic collapse with roots in the response to the recession of 2001 - all of these things have become more pressing concerns in the second five years since we marked the first five years.
Yet, while it's important for our political leaders to be aware of these changes, for the average person, this notation trivializes the experience. It may be true that in terms of preventable deaths, smoking kills more people annually than terrorism in the developed world, but that doesn't compare the terror, the anger, the feeling of helplessness we all felt on that day and in the years that followed. China's rise may be a threat, but it isn't killing Americans. Facebook - a commercial example of the marshaling of hundreds of millions of people - is similarly non-lethal, and has even come in handy when criminal-minded users collude through it online.
When 9/11 rolls around, I don't remember the attacks so much, other than having gone out on the roof of the school with a co-worker and watched the smoke billowing downtown. I remember the days and weeks after, days without work, days of busy signals, days of the mayor encouraging us to keep shopping. Weeks of no commercial flights (restored, fortunately, just in time for me to attend my brother's wedding in Wisconsin). Humvees in Manhattan, attack helicopters over the Hudson, security perimeters and a light dust that permeated the air for days. Eventually came the habituation to exclude certain subway and bus lines if they intersected the World Trade Center, still clearly indicated on yet-to-be updated maps.
We didn't know if there would be another attack. There had been four planes at once, couldn't there be more? What about ships, or trains, or trucks filled with fertilizer? Then there was the anthrax scare, as a biological weapon and cheap counterfeits of it started showing up in the mail. We don't seem to remember that anymore. The economy was in recession, in the wake of financial fraud and over-leveraged investing (sound familiar?). In short order we would invade one country, and then another, spreading American notions of freedom if not friendship, sparing no expense for our adventures abroad.
What the hell happened, that caused the US to go off track so badly? What would we be arguing about without 9/11? A sucker punch to a global hegemon, the flailing of a cyclops against a jihadi Odysseus. Knowing now what we did not know then, what do we do next?
September 11, 2001 was a day of fear. A day of loss, to be sure, and the dead deserve to be mourned by their loved ones. But for the rest of us, haven't we already spent our fear? Hasn't the terror and confusion of that day been replaced with new anxieties? For some, September 15, 2008 (when Lehman Brothers wen bankrupt) was as terrifying and confusing as 9/11. If a college sophomore in Syracuse saw 9/11 on TV, graduated, went to law school and ended up working in finance in 2008, which event would be more palpable?
What exactly are we memorializing? For me, 9/11 has a bifurcated purpose: on the one hand, remembering the dead, on the other, reminding us all of how afraid we should be. Yet, to the latter point, it aims in the wrong direction.
For myself, the anniversary of 9/11 is a time to memorialize the living. It is a time to remember the chaos of that day and the weeks that followed. It is easy in hindsight to see what we might have done differently, but at the time, who knew? On Wall Street and the Pentagon, in the homes of the passengers' families, across the United States, no one knew what was going on. We turned to our leaders, only to eventually realize they didn't know either. We have argued for and against war in Afghanistan and Iraq, whether or not to bailout the financial, automotive, and airline industries (bet you forgot about that one too).
Tomorrow, I'm sitting this one out. I'm avoiding television, and staying as far away from downtown as I can. I'll clean my apartment; watch a movie, maybe call my family as I often do on a Sunday. I don't need a special day to remember what happened; I can summon those spirits any time during the year. I'm going to think of my brothers, and how they're managing their journeys into adulthood; my niece and nephew, who have grown up largely after that date. In short I'm going to look towards the future, because that is the the only thing left to be written for me. I'm done with the past.
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