Anniversary

[poliphilo]

I've just looked at the date.

Oh my- 9/11!

Why wasn't I apprised of this? Why weren't the papers full of commemorative stuff?

I guess because we've moved on. We have Iraq to worry about. Katrina has changed the paradigm just as the attack on the twin towers once did.

This is a fast-moving century.

We're packing more history into the available time than we ever did before.

Comments

we are healed

[mazzie.livejournal.com]

we know we are healed because every major network is planning a series, mini-series or movie of the week about 9/11.

we know we are healed because no fewer than four major movie studies have films about 9/11 in production right now.

we know we are healed because sadaam is in jail, iraq is better off, and the war on terror is being won.

we know we are healed because in the last two weeks we've been tested and we have shown that, without a doubt, from the presidency to the smallest local municipalities, we are ready for whatever disaster nature or terror brings to our door.

9/11 isn't a Big Deal anymore. It's a touchstone, a movie, a reason to unilaterally invade soveirgn nations, to curtail civil rights, to creat "free speech zones" too far away for the president to see or hear. It's something to compare everything else to, it's a measuring stick, it's a postage stamp.

Four long years later, the footprint of the twin towers remains and there is still no evidence that my cousin Jimmy, a firefighter from Brooklyn, every existed. Not a scrap or fragment for his family to bury.

Four long years later and my friend doesn't recognize his face in the mirror, still. After tours in Iraq (the first time around) and sweeping for mines in Somalia, he finally got a cushy desky job, out of harm's way. At the Pentagon. One minute he was at his desk, the next he was surrounded by fire and ash and screaming colleagues. He did permanent damage to his shoulder shoving an air conditioner out of a window and lowering his colleages fromt it to the ground. His face was badly burned and later reconstructed. It doesn't look like it was burned anymore, but it doesn't look like him.

I live in Washington and I *still* look up wearily everytime I hear a plane that sounds too close. When I go to the Mall and see planes taking off, flying by the Washington Monument, I always tense a little, wondering if, as it looks from my angle, if they will collide.

I don't know what my point is here anymore; I haven't known what to say about this in the last four years, much less today. It seems like it has slipped out of reality into a soundbite, a stick to weild, a "great story."

To me, it's something different. It's the day everything changed.

Re: we are healed

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid you're right.

9/11 has become an excuse, a fig-leaf. Every time an American does something bad or questionable 9/11 is raked up to justify it.

9/11 was a horrible thing, but not uniquely horrible. Most nations round the world have experienced something comparable in living memory. Many have suffered far worse.

The people of Iraq for instance.

Britain has been luckier than most, but we too have had to deal with terror. In the 1940s the Luftwaffe had a go at us. In the 70s, 80s and 90s we suffered from a low-level IRA bombing campaign. My own city, Manchester, had its heart ripped out by a bomb. Luckily no-one was killed. We shrugged and rebuilt. Earlier this year London was bombed by Muslim fanatics stirred up by Bush and Blair's foreign policy.

9/11 was when America ceased to be an island continent and got initiated into that condition of vulnerability and fear that the rest of us accept as everyday reality.

Re: we are healed

[philtration.livejournal.com]

The fact that you accept the condition of vulnerability and fear as everyday reality is strange and sad.

Re: we are healed

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, most of the time I push them to the back of my mind.

But the fact is that terrorism of the kind we're mostly talking about here- which stems from small scattered cells and not from nation states- is very hard to defend against.

Re: we are healed

[philtration.livejournal.com]

True, but I refuse to live in fear in my own home. I can be cautious, aware or even suspicious but I am not afraid.

Re: we are healed

[saskia139.livejournal.com]

Anybody who's been directly affected, as you were, has an absolute right--indeed, a necessity--to feel the wound, to grieve, to not be healed yet.

The rest of us... should shut the fuck up. You are entirely right that 9/11 has become a patriotic story used to beat freedom into the dirt.

Re: we are healed

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

I sometimes think of the newly minted lawyers who were working at Kantor-Fitsgerald,who had graduated from SUCOL in May. The ones that were killed hadn't even worked there long enough to know if they'd passed the bar.

Re: we are healed

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Four long years later, the footprint of the twin towers remains and there is still no evidence that my cousin Jimmy, a firefighter from Brooklyn, every existed. Not a scrap or fragment for his family to bury.

Bless the memory of your cousin. He lives as long as there are those who remember.

I am so sorry for your loss.