September 11, 2011

The tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks is naturally producing a lot of commentary.  I think that's good.  While my general rule on this blog has been to avoid commenting on politics, I'm going to relax that today.  It's not that I think what I have to say is especially important, but it is what it is, and I'd like to share it.

People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy.  We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information.  Then things happen, and people get old and die.  I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II.  Things that only he remembered are gone now.  So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.

I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it.  It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language.  But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them.  I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.

I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated.  I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have.  3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number.  As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands.  I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them.  In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died.  But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not.  It affected me.

Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school.  I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other.  My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.

And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion.  It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later.  But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.

September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack.  Not until the end, anyway.  First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.

We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office.  She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.

I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room.  Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city.  This made sense at the time.

I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit.  The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it.  In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center.  No other details.  I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic.  But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize.  No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.

I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew.  At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.

At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked.  I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now.  At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.

Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day.  I respect the decision now (I might even have then).  Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.

But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid.  Bombs were being dropped.  Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking.  I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.

I realized then that this was a very important day.  I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins."  Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.

The rest of the day is a blur until the end.  At some point I got set straight about the bombing.  In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers.  I had $20.  I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting.  He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself.  I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.

Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.

I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home.  Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.

The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000.  In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.

I was mad.  I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me.  It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart.  You do not f*ck with us.  I wanted to do something.  I wanted to fight someone.  Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.

I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day.  It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were.  Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice.  He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood.  Looking back, it was a scary time.  There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.

The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened.  There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said.  I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims."  I think hearing that was good for us.

One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war.  His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would.  And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.

For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.