“Words like violence break the silence; come crashing in… into my little world.”
Each year on the days leading up to 9/11, I find myself getting frustrated at cable news and what I call “9/11 porn.” But then I wake up on September 11, ___ and I feel differently. Yes, I’m frustrated by the 9/11 porn, but it doesn’t matter. Today isn’t about that — it’s about something greater.
It’s not that I forget what happened that day, it’s just that I forget what happened that day. I can’t explain it any better than that.
So, as I sit here, tears streaming down my face, my thoughts go out to all who lost friends and family on September 11, 2001.
Be kind to one another.
[cross-posted at ABLC]
cleek
yup
Linda Featheringill
Absolutely. A moment of silence while we think of all the empty spaces and the pain suffered by those who remain.
Peace.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
HYMNS TO THE SILENCE
Van
Kola Noscopy
ABL, thank you for posting this.
I have loved this song since it first came out, but until today had never seen this video.
wow.
Keith G
I am not sure which is worse, that 9/11 happened or that all the events since have now led me to feel nothing about that event. Not. A. Thing
PIGL
By way of tribute to New York City, pre-tribulation, I would like to open for you this can of happiness from the early 90s, recorded by three very young women from Vancouver. Vancouver is a city in Canada.
MaximusNYC
I’m sick of the 9/11 industry (as a friend called it). But the reality of the day is still inescapable. As an NYC resident 10 years ago, my experience was more immediate than some, but thankfully less immediate than others. Still hoping we can build a better city, country, and world in the aftermath.
cat48
Remembered a day early by watching the Penn. Ceremony yesterday. Simple w/2 songs from Sarah McLachlan. Very moving.
Menzies
@Keith G:
I feel you, brother.
September 11th touched me when it happened. Osama Bin Laden’s picture was in our school cafeteria with his FBI Most Wanted number and contact information. For years after I was one of the biggest boosters around of the War on Terror and the Iraq War – I bit hard into the “let’s go smoke those guys out” notion.
Everything that has happened since – not least the recent battle over the Zadroga bill – has made that tragedy incredibly unreachable to me. It’s one of the few memories I still have of being twelve, but it’s hazy and foggy. And as much as I know in my brain that it was a horrible tragedy and as much as I still feel I was justified in wanting the asshole who masterminded it to die a horrible death . . . I don’t feel much about it anymore. And that’s an odd statement for me to make about anything, let alone one of the defining events of this decade.
salacious crumb
hey ABL,
if you really want to honor the Americans who died that day and the subsequent American losses, maybe you should first accept that blacks AND whites and Asians and Latinos elected Obama. not just blacks. You will have to come to terms with the fact that legit criticism of Obama as OUR president is allowed and should not be confused with racism. And when that happens you shouldn’t cry racism and ask commenters to be banned, because you know what..you aint all that different from the Tea Tards we are all trying to defeat then.
Davis X. Machina
Of a sudden, I smell something — drains perhaps?
Otherwise… said my bit.
Cacti
September 11, 2001 was one of those rare moments of tragedy that really did bring out the best in people and saw a rare moment of national unity.
Understanding that makes it all the more depressing that it became the bloody shirt was waved in the name of assaults on civil liberties, torture, and wars that never needed to be fought.
David Fud
Silence is truly golden. I think this post needs a just because wow tag. I also have been a fan of Depeche Mode for a long time, but had never seen this video. It’s quite something.
Jason Bylinowski
Yeah, uh, I don’t know, I guess I’m just over it. I mean I understand that all New Yorkers might still have some feelings about it. Certainly the victim’s families. But it just happened so long ago. I was 25 years old, I had just moved across the country, and it was a bad time for a long time when it happened. But I got over it. Now I just wish the rest of the country would so we could end our current Forever War against the muslims.
eemom
@Keith G:
you will probably appreciate Krugman’s blog entry today.
Cacti
@salacious crumb:
Only 10 posts for the first troll to make 09/11 an example of how ABL is an uppity negress.
Classy.
Yutsano
@salacious crumb: You can feel free to get the fuck over yourself at any time.
JPL
Today was for the family. I listened to the reading of the names of those that died first on CBS and when they finished their programming CSPAN online. There was no porn. I appreciate the fact that CBS didn’t bloviate.
NCSteve
Exactly. 364 days a year, I feel what Krugman said today. It’s a memory defiled by Karl Rove’s brutal, crass, pathologically cynical politicization of the event and by Dick Cheney’s pollution of the memory with the ahses of all of the lives, treasure and heartache that were burned on the pyre of his sociopathic PNAC dream.
And one day a year, I remember how I couldn’t stop crying. How day after day, something new would happen, some new revelation, another story, another funeral–or even some damn thing that was totally unrelated, like even seeing Lilo and Stitch, for Christ’s sake, and I’d find myself losing it again. And how that it seems like something permantantly broke in my male programming that day so that, even today, it seems like I cry much more easily than I ever did before, even during the other 364 days of the year.
eemom
@Cacti:
I was just gonna say, surely NOBODY — not even on this blog — would be asshole enough to hijack THIS post for that purpose.
Oh well. Ancient and jaded as I am, I continue to astound myself with my capacity for naivete.
JPL
@Yutsano: I’m shocked, just shocked that an asshole decided to throw his shit around. His/her momma must be so proud.
Emma
@salacious crumb: Jesus H. Christ. I could call you a moron but I would be offending people who have mental challenges and every day manage to be more decently human than you.
Nethead Jay
For some reason, I’m reminded of the ancient but still good advice regarding trolls: Don’t feed, ignore…
Also, very nice post ABL.
Yutsano
@eemom: The obsession with ABL runs deep. Almost to the level of visceral hatred. It’s rather disturbing that ZOMG BLACK FOLK HAVE A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE!! or something. Lawd is there still a shit ton of work to do regarding white privilege.
@JPL: I’m done. No more making this post about that.
Arclite
I like this version of Enjoy the Silence by Lacuna Coil.
So much death and destruction from this event, not only to America, but to the world. I can’t help but think that Bin Laden played us like a cheap flute, as we have used this event as an excuse to erode so much of what made us unique in the world. I remember just as vividly the helpless feeling as we reeled toward war in Iraq as the day the planes hit the towers. Unfortunately, b/c we’ve been successful in destroying Al Queda, the wrong lessons will be pulled from our reaction…
Mark S.
Krugman:
Never underestimate the stupidity of the people on the right. Or hell, the vast majority of people in this country. We’ve had no accounting or reflection on the wars we’ve gotten into.
JPL
@Yutsano: You are right. Since I use an antenna, I surfed the networks this morning. NBC and ABC made it about themselves while CBS just aired what was happening at the ceremony. It was pretty impressive. Bloomberg did a good job letting the families remember. During the reading of the names, two people who only had one thing in common helped each other. One young man maybe twelve at the most put his hand around his partner for support.
Comrade Coffin
This version of Enjoy The Silence by Nada Surf is also nice.
Yutsano
@JPL: My Book of Faces is full of personal rememberances. This is still my favorite though:
StonyPillow
Ten years of getting our chains yanked. What a waste.
The memories of remembering the memories have muted and faded the memories themselves. It’s that way, sometimes.
Love you, ABL.
opie jeanne
I have no problem with the remembrance ceremonies, but I do with the excessive wringing of emotion from us until we have nothing left.
Today we will have 911 porn served up with our baseball. A person who is only known to me on the internet and is a fan of my favorite team actually said he’d feel bad if we beat the Yankees today.
Really.
He was the only one.
We were quick to point out that the Yankees were not attacked and that other places besides New York were also hit. Should whoever is playing the Nationals or the Phillies today feel bad if they beat them?
Jennifer
Wow, ABL. I’ve said my own piece on 9/11 over at my joint, and suffice to say, I have a much darker view than yours.
demz taters
I was working for the local paper on 9-11 and covered an interfaith prayer service that night. In the notes left at the altar, there was anger and confusion but the overwhelming theme was the hope that we wouldn’t give ourselves over as a nation to hatred and fear. In the immediate aftermath, Americans sought solace in reaching for their best selves. But in the fragile period that followed, they were inflamed into following their worst instincts. Look at the result. What else is there to do this day but grieve?
Mark S.
Actually, judging by the response, I don’t think most right wingers think there was anything wrong with our response to 9/11. My favorite is the headline at Raw Story:
Were they “real heroes” before 9/11?
Valdivia
Great post ABL
Suffern ACE
I’m glad that the ceremony was for the families this year for the opening of the memorial. I had been dreading this as a replay of last year’s “Let’s make the area a Muslim exclusion zone and declare downtown Manhattan a consecrated shrine” experience.
I remember that day very vividly. It was not a very stable time.
MariedeGournay
Thank you for posting that.
Suffern ACE
@Mark S.: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ten-years-after-sept-11-the-gains-outweigh-the-mistakes/2011/09/09/gIQAxWivFK_story.html?hpid=z2
Fred Hiatt asks you not to dwell so much on the failures. Ignoring those, it’s been very successful. Also, al Quaeda is still out there and might regroup, and I’m still rich, so let’s keep doing what we’re doing.
gravie
Here’s something transcendent from the late Don Pullen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAZTYW9Z7cc
asiangrrlMN
Thanks, ABL, for the vids.
Ash Can
OK, here’s my 9/11 commemoration story. I was pretty much avoiding focusing on this day up to just a few minutes ago, but now I can say that I’ve commemorated the day in an appropriate way:
A few minutes ago, the phone rang. It was a taped message by Mike Huckabee who, with Citizens United, was circulating a petition to “kick the United Nations out of the United States,” to, in his words, “take a jackhammer to the UN headquarters in New York,” etc. When the message said that I could stay on the line to talk to someone, I did. When she came on, I said to her, “I stayed on the line to ask you this: Do you really want to be sending a phone call like this out on September 11th?” I told her that it was a very inappropriate message for this day, and insisted she delete my phone number from her records. My voice was shaking and I was almost crying. My hands are still shaking as I type this.
I need a shot of bourbon. God damn, but people are ghouls.
ETA: I should also mention that the phone call came while I was watching the second video ABL posted above. Make that bourbon a double.
FlipYrWhig
I’m starting to feel like the “So over it” / “I feel nothing” sentiments are themselves getting out of hand. Just let people feel sad. I don’t really get the _patriotic_ part myself, or the wish to act up in revenge, but there’s another element of actual shock and pain and sympathy and empathy, and I don’t want to push people who feel that way to get past it, not at all.
Jennifer
@FlipYrWhig: I think there’s another component to it, one that has nothing to do with nihilism or apathy.
It’s the feeling some of us have that we have a responsibility, as human beings, to try to make something good out of the worst, more horrible events.
We look at 9/11 and see a horrible event that a lot of people endeavored mightily to make into something even worse.
When you see it that way, it’s painful to consider it at all, or it arouses deep feelings of disgust and revulsion.
At least, that’s where I’m coming from.
handsmile
In his post entitled “Shame” that links to Krugman’s blog entry, Atrios writes with his trademark concision:
“How many people died because of what this country did notionally in response to 9/11, cheered on not just by self-styled neo-cons but the “liberal hawks” and the “decent left.” Happy 9/11 day, assholes.”
There is also this Guardian column by Gary Younge published last Sunday that incisively reflects my own conflicted feelings as a New York City resident then and now about today’s anniversary:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/04/narcissim-america-reality-failure
Krugman writes that “the memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned.” That poison has now stanched my once copious tears for the dead and grieving of September 11. That poison stokes my fury at those responsible, politically and economically, for the aftermath of 9/11, not a single one of whom has been held to account for his/her actions. That these ghouls (h/t Ash Can] are afforded respect and dignity in the media coverage of this week’s commemoration is an obscenity I cannot countenance.
Cris (without an H)
@salacious crumb: Christ, what an asshole
FlipYrWhig
@Jennifer: So was Hurricane Katrina, and yet we let people grieve about the loss and get vicarious satisfaction out of cheering for New Orleans sports teams. I dunno, I’m just surprised by the number of Ward-Churchill-like statements I’ve been seeing around the blogosphere today, bordering on how there’s nothing to mourn because the US totally deserved it. Well, I mean, I think militarism and flag-waving are inappropriate for remembering 9/11 myself, but I don’t want to police anyone else’s grief, because I dislike Wellstoning regardless of who’s doing it.
Kewalo
Very nice post ABL. Thank you
FlipYrWhig
@handsmile:
There’s no reason for the “poison” of the reaction to reduce your sympathy for those immediately touched by what happened. Frankly, to me, that’s overcomplicating and overthinking it.
Jennifer
@FlipYrWhig: If you go over to my blog, you’ll see that I addressed Hurricane Katrina in the same post. And the difference there is – though this wasn’t part of my piece – the reaction to Katrina didn’t start out as one of faux-unity that was then perverted into sinsister outlets. It was pretty much anti-victims from the start, because the only way to deflect criticism from the jackasses who completely fucked up the response to it was to blame the victims for being in the way.
I’ve never felt conflicted about Katrina, because the reaction to it was honest from day 1, and disgusting from the very beginning.
Lojasmo
Nice one, ABL.
Anya
@salacious crumb: You have a diseased mind. Get help!
FlipYrWhig
@Jennifer: OK, but I don’t think I want to let the people who perverted real feeling and real unity into “sinister outlets” get away with it, and I feel like when we try too hard to disaffiliate our feelings from what we see as the mainstream (too maudlin, too militaristic, too quasi-p0rnographic), we enable that perversion to win out. I don’t think we need to make speeches about the occupation of Gaza when we remember Auschwitz, either, even though it’s at least in some ways an outcome of how _that_ tragedy was misused and misapplied.
Reality Check
No politics today. Let’s just remember all the victims of 9/11 and all victims of unjustified, brutal, and intentional violence that have died over the centuries, particularly victims of this kind of violence done in the name of religion.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
I think Lee Marvin said it best:
.
I was born under a wanderin’ star
I was born under a wanderin’ star
Wheels are made for rollin’
Mules are made to pack
I never seen a sight that didn’t look better looking back.
Mud can make you prisoner
And the plains can bake you dry
Snow can burn your eyes
But only people make you cry
Home is made for comin’ from
For dreams of goin’ to
Which with any luck will never come true
I was born under a wanderin’ star
I was born under a wanderin’ star
Do I know where hell is?
Hell is in Hello
Heaven is good-bye forever
It’s time for me to go
I was born under a wanderin’ star
A wanderin’ wanderin’ star
When I get to heaven
Tie me to a tree
Or I’ll begin to roam
And soon you know where I will be
I was born under a wanderin’ star
A wanderin’ wanderin’ star
.
.
.
Dennis SGMM
ABL, thanks for the thoughtful post. I’ve left the television and the radio off today so that the family and I can spend some quiet time together. For me, 9/11 was one of those events, like the assassinations of JFK and RFK that bring back vivid memories of where I was and how I felt. Those memories require no reinforcement from the media.
rikyrah
OT: for anyone who reads pmcarpenter:
his wife has passed away from cancer.
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/
Villago Delenda Est
9/11 should be celebrated as “yeah, you’ve covered your ass” day in memory of the utter incompetence of the deserting coward malassministration that basically sat by and let it happen for purely cynical domestic political reasons.
lamh34
I also like to take time to remember all of the service men and women who lost there lives in service during the 2nd gulf war both those who were already enlisted and those who enlisted as a result of 9-11, 2 if my cousins & of course Pat Tillman
Anya
I will always remember the innocent lives lost on 9/11. But I am equally saddened that the tragedy of 9/11 was used to kill at least 200,000 innocent Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis. It’s an insult to the victims that the people who used their death to further their political causes are on teevee spouting platitudes about the victims and re-writing their shameful history.
licensed to kill time
On 9/11 we were at our little beach house in Baja (no TV). A neighbor came running over and said “My God, you have to see what is happening, a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center!” We went over to their place and watched in stunned silence just as the second plane hit.
Some other neighbors came by and suggested that we all have dinner together that night. A bunch of Americans came, those on vacation, expats, fringedwellers, all types.
Naturally the conversation turned to who could have done such a thing, and why. Some people started musing about American foreign policy and mentioned blowback, the fact that American government has been responsible for some pretty hideous acts, that there are people with real grievances who choose to act out in hideous ways.
This caused one woman to blow up in anger, and she cried out “Do you all hate America?! I can’t listen to this!” and she stormed out of the dinner party, slamming the door behind her.
The discussion had been pretty mild, just musings and possibilities, because no one knew much at that point and we were all still pretty much in shock. But that night has always stood out in my mind as a microcosm of American reaction to 9/11.
People react in different ways and people remember in different ways and people ‘get over it’ in different ways. I gotta respect those differences even if I don’t share them. To all those who are hurting today, I hope they find peace within themselves at some point.
Suffern ACE
@Villago Delenda Est: Works much better if we just give it to the families. It’s kind of like kids complaining on mother’s day that there isn’t children’s day. The standard response is that every day is children’s day. Well, every day is actually a time when we should be railing against malassiminstration that the serious people passed off as something worth celebrating. Why give those people one more day? Every other day is about them.
Cain
@Arclite:
Heard it live when they were out touring last year. Good stuff. :) Too bad I had to go through one death metal band to hear them. Meh.
Mark S.
@Suffern ACE:
Ugh, that was awful. And I love the gloss on torture. “Yeah, we realized it was bad and stopped doing it. What do you want from us?”
Cain
@Suffern ACE:
He wants us to forget about the several trillion dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan? Seriously? And the mounting debt that we incurred that according to Eric Cantor we must all give up our social safety net in exchange for the govt for getting us out of trouble? Nice.
JPL
@Ash Can: You are a nice person. I would have blamed the person being paid to answer the phone. That is horrible.
Jennifer
@Cain: Well, bringing up the fact that the GOP pissed away our retirement on worthless overseas adventures – on purpose, in large part just so they’d have an excuse to cut our retirement to pay for their ill-advised adventures – would be crass and a slap in the face of all those great proud patriotic Americans who died on that awful day.
ABL
@salacious crumb: You are pathetic.
Suffern ACE
@Mark S.: I would expect that kind of stuff from an individual writer. But contemplate for a minute that that was a group effort from an editorial board of one of our country’s top newspapers.
Imagine yourself in a room with the people at the link below discussing what they want to say about the tenth anniversary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/writers/editorialboard/index.html
lamh34
I was in class at University of New Orleans. When we got out of class we all rushed to tv and I couldnt believe my eyes.
I didnt not know anyone personally, and I thought I’d never see anything more horrible and then 4 years later Katrina hit my city and the horror was more close to home.
Hillary Rettig
here’s one of my favorite pieces of writing, Alice Sebold’s (of The Lovely Bones) memorial to 9/11 and Katrina victims:
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/255
Ed Marshall
I was squatting with a bunch of punk rockers and we were up for some reason fairly early in the morning. I was channel surfing and we passed Univision and there was footage of some building with smoke pouring out of it. My friend said “What the fuck is that, change it to CNN”. The chatter on the TV said that a small commuter plane had hit the tower.
A few minutes went by and a plane came into the corner of the picture and blew the second tower all to hell. One of the announcers said it was terrorism, and the other one contradicted him and said we don’t know anything yet. The first announcer said something horribly sarcastic. We all just looked at each other trying to confirm that what we just saw happened. No one said anything and I went and got cans of Old Style out of the refrigerator and passed them out. About that time the first tower fell. We were watching live footage and it included people jumping out of the building to their deaths. Whenever that would happen someone would say, “did you see that shit?”
About the time the second tower fell there were reports that the Pentagon had been struck and that there were car bombs and possible chemical weapon attacks in DC. Someone got in the record closet and took out a copy of REM’s Document and put on “It’s the end of the world as you know it”. It was supposed to be funny and people tried to laugh and sing, and it didn’t really work.
By the time night came, I was drunk and watching CNN roll out the map of the world and start calling the General’s on TV and it slowly dawned on me what sort of shit had been stirred up (the urge to blame Iraq started *that* day which seems incredible in hindsight).
Thymezone
9/11/01 started with a very early morning phone call telling me to turn on the tv. As soon I saw what was happening I logged into my “work” network and started going over a mental rolodex of things I might have to do to deal with whatever was coming. That was how I started my days back then, as soon as my feet hit the floor I was online and working, so 911 was another work day and I was working right up until the towers fell down, at which point I was just stunned into paralysis for a while. I had a neighbor who was a flight attendant so I went over there and checked with her dad to see if he knew where she was. She was not flying that day. I had plane tickets to travel on the 12th so I started unraveling that plan since it was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere.
By that evening I was just angry at the dark world of the Middle East and in the mood to strike back at whatever it was that did this thing. I told my brother that on the phone and we agreed that if we were younger we’d be looking to sign up and go get into a fight. Not long after that, the idological divisions between he and I drove us apart and we haven’t spoken now for years. He’s a fundamentalist right winger and I’m … you know. We got into a huge fight over the Iraq war runup and haven’t spoken since.
Looking back, I am more pissed at the Americans who used this event and used our anxieties over it to push this country in a bad direction, and screw us over worse than the terrorists ever did. I’m still angry over that as I write.
FlipYrWhig
@Ed Marshall:
Do you remember the Oklahoma City bombing? There was a rush to blame Islamic extremists _that_ day, too.
FlipYrWhig
@Thymezone:
I was sort of in the reverse situation. I remember thinking, if this has something to do with retaliating for something Israel did, I’m never going to forgive… Israel.
Ed Marshall
@FlipYrWhig:
I do, and when the one announcer was being cautious about who to blame, I thought “He remembers Oklahoma City”. Maybe this is ghoulish, but I kept hoping it was something domestic, because I knew what the fallout was going to be if it wasn’t.
eemom
@FlipYrWhig:
your comments on this thread are, as usual, spot on and insightful, and heartily seconded at my end.
Overanalyzing it, indeed. And to insist that any one perspective on the tragedy should obscure all others is just pathetic in its narrow mindedness.
greenergood
Thanks for this ABL- my great regret as an ex-pat new yorker is that I never went to the top of the Twin Towers (I only made it to the top of the Empire State Building because we hosted a French exchange student 40 years ago). Watching this vid was just ‘oh, I wish, I wish I’d done that’, seen than amazing view. 9/11-wise is weird for me – many people missing/gone from the neighbouhood I grew up in/ cousin-firefighters killed – but can’t help thinking 3,000 US people killed led to 300,000 Iraqis gone too, and who knows how many Afghanis, and none of their names are etched in any memorial stone anywhere.
Thymezone
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes. I include Israel in my term “dark world of the Middle East.” To me, it’s just one big ball of religious and self centered nonsense.
Valdivia
@Ed Marshall:
great comment. that is all. depressing too but says it all.
Elizabelle
@Reality Check:
Lovely post. Thank you.
Jeffro
I’ve been surprised at how many op-eds and even straight news pieces are talking about how “we” overreacted to 9/11 and/or the country is rather polarized. Not a whole lot of truthful reporting as to WHY that is, but you know, look forward not backward, right?
I was telling my better half earlier today, 9/11 didn’t divide the country. The Iraq War and every corrupted, look-the-other-way thing about it, divided the country. Once the neocons are held to account, and once Teabaggers (reluctantly, I’m sure) acknowledge that almost $1T of the national debt is simply direct costs of the Iraq War paid for with borrowed money, then maybe we’ll start coming back together. I’m not holding my breath.
Ash Can
@JPL: When she answered my question with, “Well, yes,” I figured it was clear to her that I considered her blameworthy. I’m not one to chew out telemarketers, but this was different; she knew what she was doing and evidently believed in it. I only hope that she encountered more reactions like mine, and that her vile organization lost plenty of phone numbers today. (Although I’m not at all convinced that an outfit like that would have the decency to actually delete my phone number.)
Gah. Just thinking about that call makes me feel like I need to take a shower.
FlipYrWhig
@eemom: I think that there’s a risk of the usual lefty/liberal “I’m not going to follow the herd” instinct swinging too far the other way, resulting in attempts to show how little we’re moved and how little we care and how capable we are of contextualizing and putting it in perspective. I’m not keen on that. I’m a sentimental kind of person and I don’t think we’re patsies and dupes when we react to sad news with sadness.
Along the same lines, I think Japanese people should get to mourn Hiroshima without getting a lecture about how, when you think about it, they had it coming because of Pearl Harbor and their overall approach to their sphere of influence in East Asia.
Thymezone
@Jeffro:
That won’t happen, because the Tea Party isn’t really interested in the debt. They are only interested in finding and using wedge issues like the debt to stir up resentments and churn in an ill informed public, and having their own way. They don’t care any more about the debt than they care about whether there is a debt default. If they cared about the debt they would be promoting useful job stimulus, since that’s the fastest road to debt reduction.
A Mom Anon
I wonder if the memorial and entire site being finished and open for business will help a little. I think that not having a physical place to go and grieve hasn’t been helpful.Some people never got any sort of physical remains to bury or have a funeral for,that can’t help the process of grieving at all.
I only mention this because I’m old enough to remember Vietnam and while the passage of time helped,I know having that memorial meant alot to the Vietnam vets in my family and those I knew in our neighborhood. It was a long time coming,but it seemed like it helped them and their families.I don’t know if that sounds dumb or not,but I was thinking about this today and wondering if the final stage of healing that physical wound in the ground in NYC might end up being part of the national healing process.
JPL
@ABL: don’t feed the trolls.. I was corrected earlier. Thanks for the videos.
Elizabelle
ABL:
Just watched the videos, and they’re perfect.
Thank you.
Violet
I watched some of the stuff on TV this morning. I like the memorials. The World Trade Center one is well done, with the falling water and the empty square. The Pentagon one with those little things that look sort of like airplane wings I liked as well. The Shanksville one looked like names on a wall as far as I could tell, so I’m not as sure what to think. I thought the selection of speakers and musicians was appropriate. I liked some of the stuff like looking at where people who were kids then are today, or how kids of some of the people killed that day are doing now. Ten years. Wow.
I know what you mean about you haven’t forgotten, but somehow you have forgotten. When I see the footage again, it’s so horrifying. It really was a terrible, terrible thing. I wish all the wars that followed hadn’t followed, but here we are. But that aside, the day itself was terrifying, bewildering and so hard to comprehend. I’m glad we haven’t forgotten. I hope we can move forward in a better way.
hitchhiker
It was 6 months and 4 days after my husband fell and broke his neck. It happened to be the day that he was going to the hospital to have them remove his indwelling catheter to see if he’d be able to pee on his own. (He couldn’t.) He could push himself in a manual wheelchair, feed himself if someone cut up his food, and sit up unassisted in bed if his chair was staged close enough to give him something to hang onto.
He could dress himself if the shirt didn’t have buttons and the pants were sweats, but he couldn’t put on his own socks because that’s hard to do with one working hand. He could not stand up, in spite of having some muscles firing in both legs and a little bit of action in his trunk.
Our middle-school-aged kids were eating breakfast, alone in the kitchen. I was in our new roll-in shower, listening to NPR on the radio I keep in the bathroom. Scott Simon said that he couldn’t believe the towers were “just gone.” Then he said that a third plane had crashed into the pentagon. I turned off the water.
In the kitchen I turned on the small tv and saw the video of the planes aiming for death. Jesus Christ.
For our family, this crisis was always 6 months late. The world had already turned inside out in 10,000 small ways, right? Every time I turned on the news, some bore would be talking about how everything was different now.
Really? For most of the people listening, it was definitely not different now. I knew what “different now” means, and it wasn’t this. I wept whenever they talked about kids losing their dads, because that was — and is — a real tragedy, a form of which I was witnessing on a daily basis.
The unspooling of stupidity in our public policy after that day is, as Krugman said, a national shame. So many people saw it for what it was, and yet whatever we did to stop the lunatic wars was just not enough.
Here’s the coda: my older daughter grew up and married a guy who had joined the reserves. Today — today! — he came home on leave, in the middle of his 2nd tour in Iraq. He’s 24 years old. So, it all kind of came together — her life, his life, 911, the national sadness & her personal story of perseverance.
We owe our kids better than this.
JPL
@Ed Marshall: Have a friend who is connected and we were talking that day when the first plane hit.. instantly she said it was a terrorist attack and I said you don’t know that..
Her husband told me an few hours before the news folks that the eleventh circuit upheld the stopping of the count in fl…
I guess those folks should be betting on the lottery.
Canuckistani Tom
That morning I’d woken up and headed for a 9:30 class without turning on the TV or radio. When I got out of class and was exiting the building, I heard someone saying ‘World Trade Centre’ and ‘explosion’ I thought ‘Again? Some people have no imagination’ thinking this was a repeat of the 1993 bombing.
I headed for the campus bookstore to pick up some of the books I hadn’t got yet. When I arrived, there was a TV with a huge crowd around it. I got there just in time to watch the 2nd tower fall.
For a day or so I didn’t have a good handle on the timeline of events, and so I didn’t realize that hours had passed between impact and collapse. With the scroll bar saying things like ’50 000 people work in and visit the WTC daily’, I was thinking that the US had lost more people then in Vietnam.
One thing that I remember was that the news media had broken down. The impossible had already happened, so everything that came in was reported as if confirmed, so there were tales of car bombs at the state department. I’ve always wondered where did that come from.
I remember the soul searching that happened afterwards. Amazon reporting that books like ‘History of Afghanistan’ were the biggest sellers as people tried to understand why this had happened. There were tales of people who realized ‘It could have been me, I haven’t done anything meaningful with my life’ quitting their jobs and pursuing dreams
suzanne
I’ve already said on other threads that I’m having an unexpectedly hard time with this anniversary, how I just want it to be over, how I can’t help but think about how this would have been Christina Taylor Green’s tenth birthday, and how, on the day she was killed and Gabby Giffords was shot, everyone was shocked, but not really surprised. And how the Sikh man who owned a convenience store that I stopped in frequently on my way home from high school not only lost his life, but his brother died recently, and I can’t help but think that the last ten years have seriously dimmed the light that Lady Liberty was meant to hold over the deepest, darkest corners of the world.
Fuck. Just… fuck.
StonyPillow
@Villago Delenda Est: And pretty cynical foreign policy reasons. If you’ll remember, they were busy trying to pick a fight with China in the months preceeding 9/11. As we all know now, those small bore clowns weren’t able to concentrate on more than one thing at once.
“All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” is the best they could do for something that wasn’t on their GTD action list.
I no longer depend on Republicans to even achieve the minimum competence necessary to protect my country.
Never forget.
Mike G
My feelings from that day are frequently subsumed by my anger and disgust at the exploitation of 9/11 by human sewage like Bush, Cheney, Rove and the neocons, and the hideously destructive actions that followed in terms of war, civil liberties and our national finances.
So it’s good to remember that 9/11 affected not just New York and DC, not just the United States, but for a brief moment the vast majority of the world stood with us.
This gallery of spontaneous memorials around the world in the days after 9/11 always gets to me —
When Words Fail
Chris
@licensed to kill time:
Huh. At the time, I was 1) 13 years old, 2) in a French international school in the U.S, and 3) a nerd, already interested in international relations but only beginning to learn about them.
I remember at least one person having a similar reaction (“this was blowback”), and I wasn’t offended in the least. Is it offensive or disrespectful to say that France and Britain may have contributed to the rise of Hitler via the Versailles and Munich treaties? It’s water under the bridge, it doesn’t mean you don’t go after Hitler/Osama; but you also need to be aware your mistakes if you want to stop it from happening again.
Much like Menzies @ 9, sorry to say that I bought into the wars at the time (in my defense, it was high school, but a lot of people my age knew better even then) until eventually souring on them, which was one of the big reasons I’m a Democrat.
I do remember a warning from my moderate-to-liberal dad soon after 9/11, to be careful of people who wrap themselves in the flag. Was a lot older before I understood exactly what he meant or how right he was.
Dee Loralei
Thanks for the videos, ABL. Love the song.
Tony J
It’s hard, isn’t it, to separate the actual events of September 11th, 2001, from what they led to?
How about we save September 11th for thinking about the people who were murdered, and recognise September 12th as the anniversary of what came after?
Talk about it then.
OzoneR
I’m with KThug on this.
I got over 9/11 once I realized the long-term effect it had on the United States was going to be fugly.
Chris
@StonyPillow:
As late as a couple years after 9/11, I was still finding the occasional book on the shelf at Borders talking about how China was the real threat, how 9/11 proved we were vulnerable so therefore we had to suit up and worry about China, or how China might have played a part in 9/11.
Most of the Gooper foreign policy “experts” got the memo to switch to Iraq, but apparently some people were really into the Cold War II idea. Can’t really blame them: missile defense in Hawaii would be much more profitable for the defense industry than human intelligence in the Khyber Pass.
Dee Loralei
@Mike G: That was lovely thanks for linking.
Suffern ACE
@Mike G: I remember the Masai and the gift of their cattle. 10 years on, and I don’t know any longer what stories were true at that time, but I hope that the gift was real and the gift has been repaid by the city a hundredfold.
licensed to kill time
@Chris:
Yes, her reaction was so indicative of the type of American who will hear no critique of American foreign policy without feeling it as an assault on America itself, an indication of the speaker’s lack of patriotism or some deep hatred of America.
Sadly, I had seen and heard the same type of reaction before during the Vietnam war so it was all too familiar to me. And I got this sinking feeling of “here we go again”.
Cat Lady
I was walking to International Place from South Station in Boston, and the people in front of me said something about a plane and the World Trade Center. I glanced over towards all of the flags at the World Trade Center on the waterfront, didn’t see anything unusual, and since Logan is just out of sight beyond that building from the ground, I shrugged it off. Then, I logged into my computer on the 20th floor, saw the initial reports, and then people started gathering in the conference room overlooking the harbor and the airport. When the news came that the planes that went into the buildings left from Logan, people screamed and ran. It was awful, and we were evacuated as soon as the news from the Pentagon came, since it dawned on everyone we were at war and no one knew what might happen next. I’ve been avoiding just about all of the coverage – it only makes me angry thinking about the immense good will that was almost immediately politicized and squandered by the evildoers in the White House, and the way the media clowns went along with the Iraq misadventure, “enhanced interrogation”, PATRIOT Act and all of the other venality post 9/11. The victims and their families deserved better, and I hope that the karma of the dead comes soon to bear on the karma of the living. Why is Dick Cheney still alive? If someone can explain that to me, I’d rest easier.
I want to weigh in to this thread just because. I only knew of one person who died on one of the planes – Paige Farley, who was a high school classmate of my husband’s. She was lovely and kind as I remember her. Her friend and her friend’s daughter were on the other plane that crashed into the other tower. They were both going to meet in LA to take the daughter to Disneyland. That’s what makes me so angry, that these gentle good people were exploited by people for evil – and I include Bush and Cheney in that word. There is no punishment heinous enough for them. It just makes me all so angry – all that pain and suffering of so many innocent people for what?
Ed Marshall
@licensed to kill time:
Yeah, but I heard that from people who really should have known better for awhile. You would bring up Palestinians or our support for the
tyranical clientmoderate regimes in the Middle East and they would flip out. People who would have had no problem understanding that critique a month ago decided for a couple years that saying that out loud was apologizing for murdering a ton of people.The calculus sort of shifted after it started working the other way around. There was no possible way you could put our dead on the scales and be righteous about it after a pretty short time.
hildebrand
I started a six part lecture series on World Religions today. I thought it most appropriate to honor the day by hoping to educate about the many faith tradition around the world. Today’s lecture introduced the theme and the methodology, noting that I will talking about the various World Religions in a descriptive manner, not an evaluative one.
I opened the lecture with power point slides not only of the World Trade Center, but also the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City and the island in Norway where the students were gunned down earlier this summer – noting that we so regularly jump to conclusions born of our ignorance – and this this lecture series will hope to, in some small way, offer information that should allow us to respond out of our understanding, not react out of our ignorance and fear.
Hinduism next month, followed by Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and then closing with the Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I will likely also talk about the various iterations of Secular Humanism.
Elie
@FlipYrWhig:
I totally agree Flip
People lost loved ones and all sorts of relationship to normality that day — very separate from the political manipulation, etc.
As you say, grief is grief — emotions are real. Let people be with that.
It is very hard to dissect the 911 grief grifters from the real people impacts. I feel better just knowing that they are going to grift, but that its more important the people feel what they feel… as always.
I do like the memorials. This falling wall of water thing really works for me. Using the water in the footprints of the buildings is very very beautiful and hopefully soothing to the heart of those who grieve…
Thanks ABL.
You are a good person and a huge asset to this site. I am sorry you get so much needless shit, but I think you get it and why and are at peace with it…
sigh
Menzies
@Chris:
I was in middle school at the time, but like you, I had experience with people who did not buy into it. I had my “the party left me” moment when I realized how heavily Republicans were against the social issues on which I had always been hugely liberal.
I went from being a sort of Lincoln Chafee Republican to a sort of Bernie Sanders. And all on the strength of the horror I felt at what my supposed ideological brethren were doing.
Elie
@hildebrand:
I appreciate your deeper perspective on these sort of spiritual losses. They are almost beyond understanding as just the effect of some specific actions taken by angry people. It begs the ongoing philosophical question of why we suffer and make others suffer — a deeply human question since so much of the time, the payoff for the perpetrator/s is so ephemeral or even non existent in any real material sense.
Evil. Its dimensions are observable, describable, but the reason for it remains illusive. It is, without a doubt, deeply part of the human spirit and soul and it appears, must assert itself — regularly — almost jumping out unbidden and scarily spontaneously — sometimes from those of us who never knew we had it so part of us.
No wonder so many religions have rituals for cleansing, or more extremely, exorcism.
I think that its wonderful that we have people who study this stuff and think about it. It is us and knowing who we are and how to address and fix its effects requires regarding the beast in all of its forms.
bookcat
@Keith G: I totally understand.
licensed to kill time
@Ed Marshall: I know what you mean. It was distressing to see so many people go all gung-ho, particularly in the run-up to the war(s) but I guess that’s our tribal nature poking out. Us against them is pretty much hard-wired into humans.
Chris
@Menzies:
Huh.
I didn’t exactly have one “party left me” road to Damascus moment – there were many (like taking high school economics, discovering that that field isn’t as simple as just a binary Socialist/Capitalist world where you either don’t help the poor at all or you’re Josef Stalin).
I think what got the ball rolling for me, though, was a combination of the Valerie Plame moment, and the vicious attacks on war veterans like Max Cleland and John Kerry, invariably from professional draft-dodgers. Kind of made me realize how phony, chickenshitty and yes, “anti-troops” the Republican Party really was. Things sort of snowballed from there, but that was the original trigger.
Elie
@hildebrand:
thank you for “studying” this stuff — the role of “evil” and of cleansing as well..
Humans erupt with this thing called evil — and the reaction to it ranges from fleeing to adding more evil to the pile. But evil is as integral to us as good and good works.
We have a culture that has wandered a ways from the use of magic and mediums to fuse the material to the spiritual and religious. We think of evil as mental or social pathology — or at least that is what is generally accepted.
Whether true evil exists or not, we need people like you to talk about our spirits and how we organize and understand our behavior and the results of that behavior on those around us and our planet.
Thank you for doing that and talking about it. We need more un self conscious talking about it.
Chris
@Menzies:
FYWP…
Huh.
I didn’t exactly have one “party left me” road to Damascus moment – there were many (like taking high school economics, discovering that that field isn’t as simple as just a binary Soshulist/Capitalist world where you either don’t help the poor at all or you’re Josef Stalin).
What got the ball rolling for me, though, was a combination of the Valerie Plame moment, and the vicious attacks on war veterans like Max Cleland and John Kerry, invariably from professional draft-dodgers. Kind of made me realize how phony, chickenshitty and yes, “anti-troops” the Republican Party really was. Things sort of snowballed from there, but that was the original trigger.
Wolfdaughter
I went to my progressive Episcopalian church this morning. (We do all sorts of outreach to homeless and others with major problems in coping with life, and we have to watch a tendency among ourselves to be too proud of our outreach and inclusiveness, but that’s another story).
Anyway, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona was with us, and he gave a terrific sermon about remembering 9/11 as a terrible time of tragedy, and that we should mourn the victims and their families and friends, but should not use the remembrance to further hate and division, but to reach out in peace. He talked about two women, one a mother of a victim at the Twin Towers, and the other the mother of Zacharias Moussawi (sp?) who claims to have masterminded 9/11. These two women have become fast friends, and they travel together throughout the world promoting peace and working out our differences by peaceful means. IMHO, those women represent the best and highest that humanity has to offer.
Jesus tried to teach us to love one another in the agape sense, and to forgive each other. That’s a hard one for most of us humans. I must confess that I find it hard to forgive our conservative brothers and sisters, those in Congress now, and those who promoted the useless bloodletting in Iraq. Forgiving does not mean not holding them to account, but recognizing that they are still children of God and as such not to be demonized. This also applies to all Muslims and all of humanity, including those Muslims in “terrorist” organizations. Hold those definitely guilty to account (as IF) and try to elect politicians who are willing to sit down and talk through differences. I know, won’t happen anytime soon, but a girl can dream, can’t she?
Cat Lady
@Wolfdaughter:
That’s a nice lesson. You do know that you don’t have to go to a church or belong to any religion or believe in God to understand that, right? That should really be the lesson of 9/11.
Thymezone
Today is a good day to see, or arrange to see, The Tillman Story. Netflix, Amazon, and also now on Showtime.
No matter how much you already know about this story, this movie will be something you won’t forget.
Kane
I don’t mind the media coverage of the remembrance of those who tragically lost their lives on 9/11. How we memorialize our dead often says less about those who we are honoring and more about ourselves.
What I do mind is when the media chooses to relive 9/11, which is often followed by a justification of the reckless actions that took place in the days, months, and years thereafter. And rarely does the media point out their role in cheerleading those reckless actions.
Ben Cisco (mobile)
Thank you for this post, ABL. That is all.
Shazza
That day my boyfriend was visiting me in New Jersey, his first visit to the US. We were in bed, listening to Howard Stern when Howard was talking about the Towers being hit. We turned on the TV and watched the news in horror. Howard, in a rare case of compassion, actually stayed on the air until noon, just taking calls and trying to figure out what happened. After a while we went to the local mall which was mostly empty. We then went and picked my nephew up from school and waited at my Mom’s house. She was at the hospital having her first chemo treatment. We were worried that he wouldn’t be allowed to fly home to the UK but he was. 10 years later, we’re married and we lost my mom to cancer in 2005.
contessakitty (AKA Karen)
The first thing that I remember about that day was that on 9/8/01, I flew from San Francisco to Dulles and on 9/11/01 I realized that I was at Dulles airport on one of the last days of the country’s naive sense of omnipotence. If this happened 3 days earlier, I could have been one of the dead and it put me in a bizarre position where I thanked G-d for not having me in that position while feeling sorrow for those who were. How do you say “Thanks for keeping me out of harm’s way” when so many were in harm’s way?
I’m originally from NY and my folks live on the Island. I live outside of DC now. What I remember was my fear because at first the radio was saying that government buildings were being targeted and my husband at the time worked for the IRS. I was standing outside waiting for the bus to go home and there was suddenly a helicopter flying above us and at first the other people at the bus stop and I were scared that the terrorists were going to shoot us down. It took five hours to get home that night and after not being able to reach my folks for hours I was able to and found out they were ok. By the time I got home, I found out the Pentagon had been hit, which was horrible enough, but that was the only government building that was hit and I hugged my husband so tightly when I got home.
But what I also remember is the immediate aftermath. The next day and for weeks after that, every business where I worked in downtown Bethesda had signs about 9/11 but it was almost like they were fighting for who was the most patriotic. That day I had a weird sense of McCarthyism and knew that the country would never be the same because the Bush Administration wouldn’t let it be. I knew that Muslims would become targets because I remember what happened during the Iran hostage crisis decades before.
When I visited my folks the year after I saw all the American flags on houses and cars (including my father’s) because it was the bedroom communities on the Island that commuted to the City every day that were really affected. My family knew people who’d died 9/11 or someone whose loved one died.
For people on the Island TODAY, life stopped for the people who died but its the survivors who have had to learn to cope.
wasabi gasp
I think about my nieces and nephew who are each less than ten years old. They don’t need to hear this story every fucking year.
danimal
Thank you, ABL. I never saw that video before.
I posted the U2 2002 Super Bowl halftime show on my FB this morning. In the show, they did a moving memorial to the victims of 9/11. I put in my comment that they “appropriately” memorialized the 9/11 victims.
As I read this post and comments, and as I read Krugman, I’m saddened that this type of disclaimer was necessary. It is a true shame that certain politicians and media moguls cynically manipulated these tragic events in such an awfully inappropriate manner. I may never forgive them.
Samara Morgan
i know you can’t relly liek me-liek me because of Hall Monitor Allan, AbL.
that is okfine.
:)
but i have given this a bit of thought.
i think 9/11 was a singularity.
not any of these singularities though.
it was a homo sapiens sapiens singularity.
you see, 9/11 wasn’t just a Bump in Our Road to Pax Americana and that global missionary democracy paradise…
9/11 was a sociobiological singularity.
9/11 was an infinity amplifier of the seeds of our destruction.
Samara Morgan
you see ABL…..we are reaping the whirlwind.
9/11 was the first strike on Big White Christian Bwana’s Plan for the World.
and it wasnt a “Bump in the Road” that we could overcome by “go shopping” and “spreading missionary democracy”.
it was was the first place where the Third World said…..ENOUGH.