It’s retrospection day in America, ten years after the worst foreign-sourced attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor. So here’s one more voice in the chorus. Not the most interesting or traumatic, I grant you, even within my family and friend circle: one of my sisters was living in Manhattan at the time; one friend, a native Manhattanite, was charged with working for the crisis center for Canter Fitzgerald in the weeks and months after that terrible day.
It was a gorgeous morning in New York, one of those sunny September days described in a later Sex & the City episode (one that practically anticipated the day) as “when you could feel the seasons click.” I wasn’t living in New York. I was out here in San Francisco, where an equally sunny morning greeted me as well (seasons and weather patterns being what they are, Indian Summer in SF often resembles early fall Back East).
Back then I would fret about minutiae: a tech economy that was starting to tip, jeopardizing my job and Green Card application at the startup where I worked; an uncertain relationship with a young fellow, a New Jerseyian who’d just moved Out West himself; some second thoughts about my life in California, my adopted state then of five years within my adopted homeland, where I’d struggled, kicked and torn to get in; and the usual news of the day, from market uncertainty to Gary Condit. Chicago was a city I’d once visited and liked but never considered a place to much more than lay over on connecting flights. Liver donations were unknown to me. Going around the world? I struggled to make it around the continent. And on the subject of flights, I remember reveling in the perk of being able to meet arriving passengers at the gate.
Nothing could have prepared me — not even that phone call from an early-rising friend I let go to voicemail at 6:30 in the morning Pacific Time (who the heck calls at that hour? mused my half-asleep brain at the time) — for the world-changing event that was to hit me like a Mack Truck when I switched on CNN to check the wobbly stock market on that sunny Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001.
All manner of musings today bray the conventional wisdom that “nothing was ever the same again.” That was true in America… though for denizens of poorer, strife-torn nations — like much of Africa or even parts of our own hemisphere — America’s latter-era Day of Infamy would have felt familiar: such acts of violence are tragically common in such places. Yes, as some have proferred, some of the world’s geopolitical catastrophes had even been, in some way, caused by American meddling, American profiteering… or simply the unintended consequences of Frankenstein monsters gone amuck (Osama was one of these, natch). Yet I rejected then — when I was more politically right-leaning than I am today — and reject today the notion that 9/11 was in any way legitimate payback or retribution for past American sins: the receptionist at Canter Fitzgerald or the waiter at Windows on the World restaurant was not to blame for the fate of Palestinians in Jenin or Mexicans in Chiapas — and let’s be honest, the psychopaths who planned these attacks weren’t avengers for anything but their own demented notions.
Still, it’s hard, living in the weaker beast that is the American imperium ten years on, not to suspect the bad guys won, if only just a little. If their goal was to terrorize America, to divide America, to bankrupt America… well? Although the bombings were, of course, an act of willful aggression, they really served the ultimate passive-aggressive goal of provoking an overreaction, deepening divisions, throwing the adversary off guard. Oh sure, the battle against Al-Qaeda itself has been largely won, its tentacles smashed, its leader dead. But it’s never the goal of a death cult to emerge sunlit and victorious: for them, true victory lies in taking the enemy down in subtler ways — even at the expense of their own existence.
But then, it’s all too easy to cement in one’s mind a future for the world’s most powerful superpower that is questionable at best and bleak at worst. Recurrent economic crisis — really just a delayed reaction to 9/11 that was put on the nation’s credit card in the years immediately following the attacks — only heightens present-day gloom. But as in anything in life, there is always the prospect of change, of altered shadows and better outcomes. Americans can look past their partisan divides — little more than the squabbles of outmoded ideologies anyway — and discover a new sense of purpose in the challenges of the age: the income divide, the energy question (itself tied up in 9/11 when you consider Mideast oil revenue and how it led to the wealth of the Bin Laden family… you see where this is going), the need to retain and celebrate and make ever-more accessible the “you can do anything” notion — however naive it may sometimes sound — that is a cornerstone of this country’s ideals. Talk here often shifts to the unity of the World War II era… and however sepia-tinged and swing-music-infused that bygone time may seem, we can probably learn a thing or two from the sense of purpose of the Greatest Generation.
I hope we do. Our country — nay, our world — is on the line.
