September 12th
I thought it would be just a little different this year. Hoped, really.
I thought that, because I’d heard almost nothing about it in the days and even hours leading up to it, people might give it at least a bit of a rest. After all, it wasn’t a “big”, emotionally charged anniversary. That one, the 10th anniversary (Americans love round numbers), was last year, and even that was quieter than expected, maybe because people were finally 9/11ed out, maybe because the guy widely accepted as being the mastermind behind the attacks got shot in the face a few times a few months prior, or maybe because folks could start to see a new building poking up from the New York skyline. Maybe this would be the year that people would stop picking at the scab.
Don’t get me wrong, the scab is always tempting. It itches. It’s ugly. It’s an obstruction. It also always looks like it will heal sooner or better if you just give it that one last scratch. Learning to leave it alone has been a lifelong battle for me, and judging by the state of both my middle fingers right now (I’m a nervous picker), not one I’m winning.
We weren’t talking about my scabs, though. We were talking about AMERICA’S scab.
Did people leave it alone this year?
You know the answer to that already, if you were near a television or the Internet yesterday.
Of course they didn’t.
I don’t know if it was sense memory (identical weather near New York on a Tuesday) or what, but as soon as the clock struck 12, it started. America’s annual Halloween Spirit store of grief opened for business right on time. Honestly, in a lot of cases I saw, that’s what it felt like, and what it always feels like to me. Grief cosplay. It’s the one day on the American calendar where people can take their pain related to a particular event and make it a whole lot sluttier than usual.
This isn’t to say that some peoples’ grief isn’t real, not by a long shot. I know people who were there. I know people who lost family, friends and neighbors. I met one guy who took the morning of September 11th off to run errands, and as a result, is the only person still alive from an office of over 30 people. Within about a degree or two of my acquaintance, people attended a lot of fucking funerals.
As far as I am aware, I have not personally lost anyone as a result of the events of September 11th, not yet anyway. I’m sure this “disqualifies” me from speaking about this subject in the eyes of some people (there are rules, after all), but since those people already don’t think my opinion counts, then it also won’t count if I call them ridiculous, self-centered, and arrogant for acting at times like their losses give them a monopoly on grief, or on how people choose to grieve. I have lost people before, and I understand that it has this way of making you think your pain is bigger than the rest of the world’s, but it never excuses it.
So, back to that “not yet, anyway” from the last paragraph: I know one guy, nicest guy you’ll ever meet, who suffers like hell from diseases he got from being in lower Manhattan during and after the attack, and a bunch of other folks who are in the high-risk category to eventually develop illnesses (some of them terminal) due to their prolonged exposure to the toxins that were in the air after the World Trade Center fell. One of the people in that high-risk category is my sister, who I’m after pretty regularly to get checkups and stay on top of her health in light of this. Of course, plenty of those folks have had to fight tooth and nail to even have their illnesses acknowledged, never mind taken care of. You see, insurance companies don’t want to pay for them. Our government doesn’t really want to pay for them, either, and since insurance companies could be considered part owners of the U.S. government by this point…well, do the math. This happened on Monday, almost 11 years after the fact, and far too late for many of the people affected.
Why were many of these people exposed to these lethal toxins? Apparently, from what I saw, because “the terrorists would win” if the financial industry was disrupted for too long. Stocks and bonds were deemed to be worth substantially more than the lives and well-being of the people who trade them for a living. Man, even the Soviet-era Russians gave up the ghost on the status quo after a few days when Chernobyl happened, but no, we couldn’t do that. We had to keep the rich folks getting richer and show how tough we were by throwing more bodies on the pile, plenty of which weren’t dead yet.
We’re still doing it, too. We’ve had two wars in some sort of progress since we scrambled the jets a little too late. One of those wars, the one in Iraq (which is supposedly “over”, though we have permanent bases within the country now and people are apparently still dying), had nothing to do with 9/11, but the folks in office sure wanted us to believe that it did. You can read about the casualty numbers on that conflict here, though we’ve done kind of a lousy job keeping track of how many people we’ve killed there. The other one, the one in Afghanistan, is still very much in progress, though I bet this isn’t too far from the truth of how our soldiers there feel. As for casualties in Afghanistan, good fucking luck making sense of these numbers.
Did we ever get the people behind the attacks (besides the ones who, you know, killed themselves actually making the attacks), though? Yes, Osama Bin Laden’s dead. Just about anyone who realistically had a goddamn thing to do with him, the hijackers, or anyone who knew them on that level is either dead or in a cell in Cuba eating cockmeat sandwiches. There are a few exceptions, but eventually, sooner than later, they’ll attend a wedding or a funeral and a drone airplane will open fire on it. That’s happened a bunch in recent years.
I wonder if the survivors of these wars and those attacks or their families have a day like 9/11 in their countries yet.
I wonder what their Facebook walls look like, if they have them.
Are we making progress in any other parts of “the healing process”? Yes, there’s a new, ugly building just about done being constructed in The Big Hole In The Ground. It looks like one of those buildings in Dubai that I’ve seen pictures of, where all the rich folks of the world (including our rich folks) go to party. Funny how that works.
See?
Just below that building, there’s a new memorial open to the public. Sort of. From what I gather, it’s actually easier to get into the Guantanamo Bay detention facility than it is to get into the 9/11 Memorial and make it through a visit without being harassed. You need to get “tickets to 9/11″ (as someone, sadly I forget who, overheard some tourists saying in New York recently). You need to provide all sorts of information to the people running it. You need to display “your papers” at all times while visiting it. I haven’t visited it yet (though I’m thinking of doing so soon, just so I can experience this on a firsthand basis), but from everything I’ve read about it, it sounds more like a shrine to a rising police state than to fallen Americans.
If you want a better look at that police state, without getting a “ticket to 9/11″, just watch news coverage (if you can find any) of the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street this coming Monday. You should see a lot of people from all walks of life getting the holy hell beaten out of them by the police officers who’ve taken the place of “the brave heroes who gave their lives on September 11th”, a few blocks away from the World Trade Center, just for the crime of asking for a fair, equitable society.
Well, it seems that we’ve come full circle to anniversaries. Can we talk about a few others in relatively recent history?
Pearl Harbor: foreign attack on what’s now considered American soil, nearly as high a body count as 9/11, and it also finally kicked our asses into a world war, which led to a much greater body count. Yet, I’ve been alive for 38 years out of the 71 since that attack, and I’ve never seen the entire country STOP to “honor America” for the survivors or their families on December 7th. Hell, we barely close stores on Veterans Day and Memorial Day anymore, even though we keep adding veterans and keep losing them in wars.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: kind of a big deal in Japan, and maybe the worst couple of days in the history of what we optimistically call “civilization”. Nope, despite there being about 767,000 Japanese-Americans (some of whom were either held in internment camps during World War II, or have relatives who were), no moment of reflection there, either. After all, we “won”, right?
Jonestown, which I’d imagine ripped San Francisco apart in a way similar to what 9/11 did to New York? Nope. No national day of mourning and reflection there. Best we sweep that one under the rug. After all, a white guy was behind all that, and hey, he was a Reverend, too! How do we explain that to the kids we’re trying to indoctrinate?
Waco? With that piss-poor body count? Please. Not even the killing of that most sacred of being, the unborn child (2 pregnant women died in the assault on the compound), could make us care about 76 people being burned alive by our own government on live television, because we were told that they were bad people. Bill Hicks had some pretty strong opinions on this, but of course, he’s not around to campaign for round-the-clock coverage of the Waco anniversary, nor would he if he were, because Bill was sane and decent.
Oklahoma City? Man, that was 2 white guys. We can’t let people get upset about that over and over again! We gave the locals a basketball team to shut ‘em up. Moving on…
Seeing a pattern here? (I mean, aside from “the guy writing this is a jerk”. I’m willing to take that if what I write wakes a few people up.)
I think there are three forces at play where the rather gross overmemorialization of 9/11 is concerned:
1. The propaganda wing of the fascist elements within the United States, including but not at all limited to your Fox News types. This structure really didn’t exist during any of the previous events. It started when Richard Nixon met Roger Ailes while he was working on the Mike Douglas Show. Yep, another thing we can blame Nixon for. Someday, I’ll make a full list.
2. Racism and other assorted forms of xenophobia. This event painted a target on the second biggest religion, in a country where most of the extremists practice the biggest religion. (No, not American football or money, at least not exclusively.) That “biggest religion” had a huge power grab in progress before this happened, but this was an event they could point to and say “See? Those people aren’t just practicing a different faith than ours, they’re THE ENEMY!” to people who’d probably never even met a Muslim.
3. The vanity and selfishness of rich, mostly white baby boomers, the group most heavily and directly affected by the attacks. Let’s face it, after World War II, a lot of soldiers settled in the Levittowns and such around New York City, and had kids that became the stockbrokers killed in the attacks and the media moguls who did business with them. A lot of the world’s power in both finance and news media is concentrated in a few square miles of Manhattan, as a result. Those kids grew up into adulthood with parents who’d just “won” a world war, parents who were referred to as “The Greatest Generation”. If you don’t think they’re going to tell *their* story, for better or worse, or that they grew up feeling at least a little more entitled than the average person, then you’re obviously not human or paying attention.
None of the other rather tragic events I named had the perfect storm of these three factors, and given how things have played out with them in play, I guess we can actually be sorta thankful for that.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m self-aware. I suppose it’s pretty vain of me to write a couple thousand words in the middle of the night, loosely about how 9/11 makes me feel (as a guy who has not yet lost anyone from the attacks), and to expect folks to read it or care. But, well, I have and I will tell you how I feel anyway. I’m mad as hell, but not for the reasons I’m “supposed to be”. I’m mad that, in the aftermath of these attacks, the country I live in has made a complete transformation into the country we were never supposed to be. We were fearless, and now we’re afraid. We weren’t free, but we were a freer place and now we’re profoundly less so. We kept telling ourselves that we were “the good guys” and occasionally we were right despite how we treated those who were on this land before us, other American citizens and people abroad. Even that, we’ve pretty much given up on, and have stopped even pretending to have any moral high ground. These things are my “loss”, and why I grieve.
There is one more thing that makes me both angry and sad, though. The person I’m closest with that experienced the World Trade Center attacks? The one who was MIA for a few hours while her family waited to hear from her? The one who had to run from the collapse and the debris cloud, managed to get to the Staten Island Ferry, bum a ride across Staten Island from a co-worker, walk across the fucking Outerbridge because it was closed to car traffic and hitchhike the rest of the way home by 1 PM? The one who, at last count, still had her dust-covered shoes in a Ziploc in her closet? She’s told me that, every time she hears someone say “NEVER FORGET”, she kind of wants to punch them, because all she wants to do is forget that day, and no one, not even the people who were there and understand that no one should’ve had to experience and re-experience that day, will let her. (Hell, I’ll probably hear shit from her for making her “part of the story”, as it were.)
Folks, for the good of her and people like her, will you please accept that it’s OK for some people to “forget” certain things and live their lives?