Reflection: September 11, 2017

[Note from 2020 Katie: I wrote this here, on this blog, on September 11, 2017, and left it in drafts. I was sitting on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment building, looking at the blue memorial lights from One World Trade ("Freedom Tower") and the red, white, and blue Empire State Building. I stopped mid-sentence, but this is what I managed to get down. Perhaps it defies conclusion, at least for now.]

“The events of those four days rendered our family to the bone. For one brief moment…[my mother] had the tallow of what remained of us in her hands. That day…she could have molded us into whatever shape pleased her, and I would have gladly been formed. Instead, her neglect turned us to dust and blew us into opposite directions.”

That’s a quote from a play I’ve seen more than once, and it’s been on my mind a lot today. As I write this, it’s September 11, a date that has historical and personal significance to me, which makes me not even remotely unique in this country, but there you have it.

There have been thousands of think pieces about this, so far be it from me to try and trace all the various messy threads of history that have lead us to this moment on a macro scale, but no one can deny that September 11, 2001 was a turning point, a moment of pure rendered beef fat, if you will, for this country.

I don’t remember what President Bush said the night of September 11, but I do remember watching it. I think I stood up and clapped when he said we were going to go after whoever had done this. At 11, I had only vague ideas of the strange, twisted road this man had taken to the presidency, but I remember feeling like he had us, all of us, in his hand. I was right, as it turns out, but not the way I thought I was.

He could have made us anything in that moment. And not just him. All of us had a choice to make in that moment, as we gave blood and gathered supplies and hiked to the top of the mountain to watch the blue lights being lit in honor of our friends and neighbors (literally, in my case) who had given their lives, we were told, because we were free and “those people” (I had never heard the words al Qaeda before, and I’m still not sure I’m spelling it correctly) hated that. We had been rendered to the bone, but the bones were strong. We had the power to mold ourselves into a model of freedom and democracy, a shining light on a hill, we could be whatever we wanted in that moment.

What did we choose?

It’s hard for me to say. I love this country. I’ve traveled quite a bit since that moment in my parents’ basement, and I’ve learned I love this country a lot. But to pretend that we have worked to better ourselves since that moment, to become a cohesive unit or symbol of everything that is good about humanity is laughable. Or at least, laugh-to-keep-from-cryingable.

What did we choose?

We chose to declare war on an abstract concept, ensuring that men and women who weren’t even born that day would go into countries most of our citizens can’t find on the map to fight against people who might have thoughts much more complex than “freedom is bad” if only anyone ever asked them.

We chose to allow President Bush and his friends to convince us that Iraq was probably involved and probably bad people because their millions of citizens sorta maybe looked like the 19 not citizens who hijacked 4 planes two years prior.

We chose to allow President Obama to declare any brown person over the age of 12 an enemy combatant and remove all so-called humanity from war through drones, rendering an entire country (an alleged ally at that!) scared of sunshine.

We chose truthiness over facts, fake news over critical thinking. We chose to continue the decades-long campaign against science, flood our gulf with poison, laugh at those who decided they didn’t need a gas-guzzling tank on the suburban streets, and ignore the man we had actually elected president when he screamed into the void that the world really was about to end, I’m super serial.

We signed over more and more of our civil liberties and barely blinked when someone committed treason to try and help us see what was going on.

We chose to elect a fucking white supremacist fascist to power after 8 years of relative progress because he had the balls to say out loud what we were thinking in our collective American brains: they’re scary. They toppled a building. All of them. Every one.

Also decidedly not unique to me is the sense of anxiety and dread that has taken hold over my soul since November 2016. While we may not have had the coherent thought (I personally had no coherent thoughts at all that night), for those of us who were children on 9/11, this was a second turning point. A second candle held in the palm of our hands.

What have we chosen this time? No one can deny that civic engagement is at an all-time high. Marches, protests, letters, phone calls, petitions: we have not allowed our leaders to forget who they work for and we have not allowed 45 to do a goddam thing, frankly. But do I feel hopeful? Not at all. The candle is long and it’s lit from both ends.