I never noticed how ubiquitous airplanes in the sky were until they were gone. In the days following, I would look up at the sky and marvel at how strange and different it felt to have something missing that I never even noticed was there.
Now, like airplanes in the sky, I'm aware of 9/11 but don't consciously think about it. I listen with one ear tuned to the morning news while I'm getting ready in the bathroom. I hold my breath when my train, crowded with commuters, goes over the river. Once I glanced up on my walk to work and saw pieces of white, thick in the air by a skyscraper and I thought, ah yes, papers floating everywhere just like the WTC - something must have happened. (The white turned out to be hundreds of chunks of ice hurtling toward the ground from the tops of skyscrapers after a weekend of unusual weather.) I'm not fixated by it. I don't often think about terrorism. It's just part of the collective subconsciousness now. And yet, even though I had no personal connection to that day, it's still raw. I hate the media spectacle every year; I want everyone to remember it quietly, respectfully.
I look back at the last decade and see a series of disconnected events that - to me - stem from that day. 9/11 was the blow that shattered us like safety glass. Clinging together through the initial shock and then crumbling into separate shards.
I'm proud and grateful to be American. But I'm also embarrassed and disappointed in our reaction to 9/11 and our ever-growing incivility. I've read enough U.S. history to know that the fractures were always present; they didn't appear after 9/11. The us versus them mentality has existed as long as this country has existed, shifting from us to us and them to them.
Yet the us versus them has seemed so frantic, so all-encompassing since 9/11. As the collective, we've handed away principles in fear. We've seemed so desperate to be insular, homogeneous; the new American dream is to make sure that we are all the same and that only the deserving can reap the rewards of living in this country. The question as to who are the deserving is put to a popular vote.
We had the opportunity to learn more from 9/11 than we did. We could have become students of history, of foreign policy. But that requires subtlety. It can't fit into a soundbite. So we're told - and we believe - the simplistic idea that they hated us for our freedoms. We let "freedom" become a trite phrase, slapped onto our cars in magnet form but not appreciated for what it really means in our lives. I've heard harsh words leveraged at people who others feel are insufficiently patriotic. People who, like me, admit that the love I feel for my country is complicated. Honestly, it took me years after 9/11 to shake off the shock - maybe half the decade - to suddenly realize that we were on a collective trajectory that made me uncomfortable. Actions taken by our government, and actions taken by we, the people.
"History teaches us that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure." -Justice Thurgood Marshall
We know that in the years after 9/11 the NSA, without a warrant, intercepted phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans - not suspected terrorists - journalists and businesspeople, you and me. We know that phone companies allowed it - even let the government build entire rooms, apparently siphoning off an entire network, to accomplish this. When it became public knowledge, we collectively yawned in the face of the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement. As long as it prevents terrorism, we'll allow it. Then we let Congress vote away our right to bring a lawsuit over the spying, cutting off our ability to even learn what had happened and when and how and who - with two legalistic words: "retroactive immunity." And no one blinked. We are better than that.
As recently as this summer, we've engaged in strategic air strikes aimed at assassinating an American citizen abroad, which officials say is unprecedented. Adding an asterisk to the Fifth Amendment: "No person* shall... be deprived of life... without due process of law. *Unless we say you're a terrorist." We are better than that.
Our government has tortured people. We don't use that word anymore because it's somehow now debatable that pouring water down the nose and throat of a person rendering him unable to breathe 183 times in 30 days constitutes torture. It doesn't give us confidence when prisoners die of "suicide" in custody and the story doesn't add up. The fact that we're the "good guys" doesn't make it okay, and it certainly doesn't convince anyone that we are indeed good. We are better than that.
A comedian had to shame Congress into voting for a bill that would help the 9/11 first responders who have developed devastating medical conditions. And when that bill finally passed, it exempts cancer because they can't prove that being a first responder caused their cancer. Of course, no one can prove why they got any kind of cancer. But we can prove that officials deleted cautionary statements about the air quality and left only reassuring ones in the wake of the attack. We can prove that first responders have developed alarming health problems, often connected to their respiratory systems. We are better than that.
It's not just the government that I've grown uncomfortable with.
It's jingoistic and xenophobic facebook statuses from my friends and relatives. (One of whom fervently believes the First Amendment's promise that the government cannot prevent the free exercise of religion doesn't apply to Muslim Americans.)
It's politicians and ordinary Americans calling for racial profiling. Never mind that you can't tell someone's religious beliefs by looking at them.
Over time, our hatred of "them" seems to have expanded to a larger and larger "them." A "them" that we perceive as threatening to take away what "we've" worked so hard for. An "us" that has become frenzied, unrecognizable.
A town hall meeting last summer where a woman stood up to describe her medical problems, the impossibility of getting insurance, and the havoc it had wreaked on her life since the accident that left her in such a dire situation. Another woman stood up. "I shouldn't have to pay for you," she snarled straight into the woman's face, not cognizant of the fact that but for the grace of God the roles could have been reversed. That she was one car accident away from the same situation. Another town hall held in my city where a person told a woman that her daughter-in-law deserved her death from cancer because she couldn't afford treatment. We are better than that.
Overwhelming applause at a debate this week at the mention of the fact that a U.S. governor has put to death 234 prisoners during his term. Pro death penalty or anti - I don't care which side of the fence you fall on. Either way, we don't relish it. It's not something to applaud wildly about. We are better than that.
You may think that some of these events are tenuously connected to 9/11 - or not at all. I wouldn't disagree with you. This is only my perception; this is the swirling mass of thoughts and emotions that to me are inextricably intertwined with that day. People are often accused of politicizing 9/11 and perhaps I've done the same here, but the sad fact is that it has become political. When I mourn for 9/11, I mourn not only for those who died that day and since then (including our many soldiers), but I mourn for our collective loss of innocence. For our principles we gave away in the name of protecting ourselves from terrorism. For the incivility reaching a crescendo in the decade after. For the loss of my American dream.
"This is just a test. Take it with love and you will pass." -Kimya Dawson, Anthrax
(I did not plan to write a post for the 10th anniversary. Then I read jjiraffe's post and Mel's post (which had a thought-provoking comment about how Americans collectively perceive 9/11 now), and I was intrigued. I can't speak for the collective and I don't pretend to try. For me, this post was far more difficult to write - putting more of myself "out there" - than any post I've written before. I know many of you won't agree with what I've written, but please be kind.)