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9/11: Thinking big thoughts
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For Americans, September 11 means so many things now. It has crystalized in our minds the current state of the world, and it has made 9-11 a symbol - for both the worst in people, and the best. There are many other significant dates in our history that have also become symbols like 9-11, that roughly have the same meaning or impact, like December 7, 1941, for instance, though perhaps not exactly to the same degree. One of the big differences, though, is that 9-11 was not seventy years ago, but a recent event. This makes 9-11 our generation's Pearl Harbor, and it is therefore able to show a more contemporary image of the same kinds of emotions that both evoke.
Because they strike such a responsive chord in people, events like 9-11 and December 7th move people, whether they are moved to an emotional response (Have you heard the recordings of the people who died in the buildings, when they called their families just before the buildings collapsed? I know I cried.), or moved to action (some years ago, I saw a program about 9-11, and there were kids there that said they wanted to be like New York firemen and help people). Perhaps there is some good to our world being so web-enabled and media-saturated: how else could people be touched this way?
But then again, our media-saturated society has this tendency to trivialize things. Perhaps through over-exposure, over-commericalization, whatever. Hopefully. 9-11 will remain more relevant to us than just another Christmas special or another Memorial Day speech made by another politician trying to make points with the electorate.
Over and above all the glitzy shows on TV, the fancy and shiny memorials, the well-spoken speeches written by people more intelligent than you and me, spoken by people more charismatic than you and me, we must remember the basic thing, and remember what happened and why.
To see Bobbie's stories in BCTS, click this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/14775/roberta-j-cabot
To see Bobbie's "Working Girl" blogs, click this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/19261/working-girl-blogs
To see ALL of Bobbie's blogposts, click this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/blog/bobbie-c
Comments
Remembering
Thanks for the reminder. I worked at an outpatient substance abuse program that was adjacent to our county's Memorial. White markers strew the field, corresponding to each soul from our county that perished at the World Trade Center that day, with a section of steel from the South Tower as the focal point of the memorial.
Real people died that day while doing nothing but working at their jobs to try to make a living for themselves and their families, along with the brave men and women of the the Police and Fire Departments who saved lives while giving their own. My brother's neighbor lost a brother who perished while serving as a firefighter. My best friend lives in a home once owned by a family who lost their father when the North Tower came down. Virtually every one of my neighbors and friends knew someone who perished. My brother-in-law visited the South Tower with his best friend the day before while they were attending to business in the city. So many lives needlessly lost.
I am reminded of the beautiful but wordless hymn by John Williams written for Saving Private Ryan. Perhaps no words were written because so many died on the occasion of D-Day, and it would be fitting as well for the memory of those who perishing on September 11, 2001, since they were from all over the world; nearly every walk of life and speaking a myriad of languages and dialects; practicing every religion or none at all. I've included a link to Katherine Jenkins' stirring rendition. May we grow to never needing to commemorate such an event ever again. Thank you Bobbie once again and God bless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xeZTro2lPU
Dio vi benedica tutti
Con grande amore e di affetto
Andrea Lena
Love, Andrea Lena
I remember
I was there just ten months earlier, in November 2000. People say that they remember where they were when President Kennedy was shot; I don't.
I do, however, remember, as though it were yesterday, where I was when I heard that the towers had been hit. I can almost picture the scene in Dover, in Kent UK, and how I heard. Someone had called the woman at the adjacent table while I and my partner at the time were having a snack.
I don't think I'll ever forget that the world united, for but a short time, to mourn the loss of so many people of so many nations, not just Americans.
My heart goes out to my friends across the Atlantic. May your future be brighter and happier, may we all unite in love and friendship and always remember that which unites us is far bigger than anything that could divide us.
Susie
I was in college
I'll always remember that day. I was in college, in the library, reading Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when the first plan hit. I din't know what happened until I got to my second class that day and boy was I freaked out.
I watched them fall.
The attack was on the news as I ate breakfast, on the West Coast. After a month, it was still on the news every single night and I finally stopped watching the news, and have not gone back to it. It was the first time I had ever witnessed so many people die at once. It was and still is aweful and I will never forget it.
We'd been to Kenya that spring and I came back extremely dismayed with my own life. How could I sit in my fat yuppy home in the US and do nothing, knowing that people in Kenya led such poverty stricken lives? It is the same for Honduras, and so many other places in the world.
My response to 9/11 was to begin reading voraciously about those who attacked us. It took lots of time but by now I had friends and aquaintances in the international community and it was astonishing to me that the American way of seeing things is not shared with the rest of the world. I should have realized because when I was in Kenya, one of the people there said that Americans were so rich. "Rich?" I thought. Geez it too every penny we had to make that trip. I returned home knowing that there was something very wrong in the world. As I tried to become involved in various relief agencies, it was clear to me that a major portion of the money people give just goes to overhead. I tried to send my friends in Kenya and Honduras money but governments and graft took a major bite out of it at each stop along the way. Between the trauma of 9/11, the realization that I could not do meaningful things to help the poor in other countries, and dealing with my own hidden GID, it broke me.
In the post 9/11 world, I really began to question the value of all the energy that I was expending in trying to keep Gwen hidden. I was putting up with so much.
9/11 kept coming back to my mind. How could we as Americans make a group from another country so mad at us that they would go to all that trouble to hurt us? I was working for the City of Hillsboro, Oregon as the City Electrician, and in the pre-9/11 days, it was a very relaxed job. Everyone who worked there talked to each other. Being in maintenance, I had keys to everything, and wound up talking to everyone from the Mayor to the guy who ran a steam roller. Pretty often,when I was on call, I'd get a call in the middle of the night to do everything from reset a breaker, fix a boiler, unplug a toilet, or board up a house that the cops had shot up. We were all close knit and it was a fun job. I could handle it for now.
After 9/11, the city changed to a tense, harsh place. There were rooms I suddenly could not go in because the FBI, Homeland Security, or some loose cannon said I couldn't. My pile of keys became about 1/4 the previous size. More than once, I left the Cops, or IT, or someone else to freeze or with no power, because suddenly I did not have the clearance to enter. Fine, fuckem, let them figure it out.
It became the realm of the shmoozer and the ass kisser, and in those days I was not sucking dicks.
I was not Muslim then, but had figured out that the guys who did the deed, were crazy idiots!
About that time, one day my clock just stopped running, and I told my pastor that I wanted to be a woman, that I was raised that way and that is what I was, and I just could not go on any longer. Quickly, the prescription drugs dulled my senses to the point that I could pseudo function, or at least make my body go to work even if my mind didn't.
Later, after I'd lost my job, got thrown out and divorced, thrown out of church, lost all my friends and was living in a Bed Bug infested apartment downtown, I began to search for some meaning to it all. By then, we knew that around 3000 people died, many of them the rescuers. People from 70 different countries died. 57 of them were Muslims.
There is not a single day that goes by that I do not think of 9/11. My studies into the causation of the event eventually led me to convert to Islam. Anyone who thinks the live of a Transgender Muslim is easy, should try it. Still, I can see that there is much hate for Muslims in America and for good reason. I think that the actual numbers of crazies is probably less than a few thousand.
Post-9/11, I am still searching for God. I'm seeing that all the religious establishments have failed miserably, Muslims included. I live close to a Military Base now. I see the soldiers in uniform on city streets all the time, though I don't know where they come from. Not a one smiles at me dressed in my Hijab and modest clothes. How would I expect it to be any different?
These days I often ask myself if I am in Hijab because I am Muslim or is all that clothing just good camoplage? I think it is 90/10 I hope. I don't want to become part of a group of nut cases. I just want to find God, and so far what I have seems like the best answer for me.
9/11, my heart breaks every day for the lost of so many families in the us. For those who have lost loved ones in "Bush's" war. For the lost peace of those who served over there; for the innocent civilians who have died there. It is all unspeakably sad.
Gwen
Remember
I'd be happy if people simply remembered who took them down.
For those who haven't been there, I would recommend you visit the FDNY memorial on the side of Company 10. Information concerning it can be found at;
http://www.fdnytenhouse.com/news/fdnymem.htm
Nancy Cole
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
I dont think i will ever forget
My memories of that day start with being at a local hospital, working in the ICU, I was watching a patient, and he was watching TV, flipping through the channels, when we saw the news about the first plane hitting the towers. We watched for a bit, and I thought of the old movie, "The towering inferno" and I wondered how they could fight a fire that high up. He started flipping through the channels again and so we missed the second plane hitting, but caught a replay. Soon, i was off duty, and headed home, and listened on the radio as the towers fell and it was clear that it had been an attack. I went home, crawled into bed with my 1 1/2 year-old baby, and cried until i fell asleep.
9/11
I'm can't really remember 7th December as I was born the following January. I always remember the Day that John Kennedy was murdered, for one it's My Mothers Birthday, two: I was at work when a customer came in and said the President has been shot, I thought that he was joking as he always was doing things like that and I ask him what was the joke when he told me that he was't joking go turn the radio on, and that's why I'll never forget that ever. Now September 11, I was in bed as it was my day off and my room mate came and woke me up and said to turn the news on as something bad was happening in New York City and that's all I watch the rest of the day, so I dougt I will ever forget that day ever. One thing I remember was when they showed President Bush at a School Room in Florida and when they came and told him what happen he came up with the dumbest look on his face like God what do I do now! That's all I will say. But, memories can do that to you when there is such bad things happening. Richard
Richard
A day to be remembered...
One important difference between the Pearl Harbor event, and the World Trade Towers, was that the former was a military target and the later a civilian. (Okay - the Pentagon, a military target, was also hit on 11-Sep.)
There have also been other events - good and bad - that have shaped perceptions of people in our country. Several examples - in no particular order:
1) 22-November-1963: Where were you when Kennedy was shot
2) 4-July-1863: The fall of Vicksburg colored Mississippi for a hundred years (they didn't have fireworks on Independence day, for example)
3) 21-July-1969: A giant leap for mankind
4) 13/14-September-1814: Francis Scott Key observed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry
5) 4-July-1776: Declaration of Independance
6) 12-October-1492 (Julian) or 21-October-1492 (Gregorian): Columbus...
It's important to remember history. Thank you for your post.
Anne
No Difference
If you accept the premise that in total war, as put forth by Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, there is no difference between uniformed combatants and the civilian population that supplies and sustains them, then there is no difference between December 7th and 9/11. The concept of strategic bombardment as first put forth by Italian General Giulio Douhet and later espoused by RAF Air Marshall Hugh Montague Trenchard furthered Clausewitz’s supposition by giving modern military forces the power to carry total war out to its logical conclusion. It was this principle that led to the employment of area bombardment used by the Germans across Europe and then the Allies against Germany and Japan in World War II.
And least we forget, as terrible as total war is, Clausewitz went onto discuss what he called absolute war, one in which the combatants continue until one side is totally eradicated. In the War of the Triple Alliance, fought from 1864 to 1870 between Paraguay and the allied countries of Argentina, Empire of Brazil, and Uruguay, Paraguay’s prewar population of approximately 525,000 Paraguayans was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men. In our time we have seen several wars come close to meeting Clausewitz’s concept of absolute war, including Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. Nuclear weapons are not needed for the execution of absolute war. None of the combatants in the conflicts had them. Nukes only make the killing more efficient and less messy then a machete, the weapon of choice in Rwanda.
So let us deal with reality of 9/11 as it was intended by those who initiated it. It was an act of war, no different than Pearl Harbor.
Nancy Cole
"You may be what you resolve to be."
T.J. Jackson
bravo
I think our politics are different, Nancy, but your analysis is excellent.
I have one disagreement, but only in kind. 9/11 wasn't an act of war against the USA (if nothing else, a terrorist band can't really declare war). It was a strike against modernism, using the most modern of tools, the jet airliner. That New York was the target was almost an accident of representation, because at the time, and still, New York remains the exemplar of the best and worst of the enlightenment, modernism, postmodernism and everything that's come since. Blowing up a building in Kansas or Paris would never have had the same resonance for the rest of the world.
And, as you say, the bizarre romantic (in the true sense) idea of war as something solely between warriors is long gone.
I'm never going to forget 9/11, ever, but it's more for what it meant in terms of civilization than nationalism. I might be a kind of patriot, but never a nationalist. But I fear for our civilization, as much at the hands of local idealogues as terrorists.
As an aside, I think the most brilliant movie of the lat decade is United 93. I couldn't bring myself to watch it, for so long, because - well, who wants to relive that? But it's so beautifully made, so sensitively done, so terrifying in the way it personalizes the conflict. I loved it, in a heartfelt please-don't-make-me-live-through-that-again-way.
Anyway, not to disagree with you. Your point is very well made. I'm probably just reacting to the jingoistic mood the media seem to be foisting on us. I remember 9/11, and I'll never forget. Ever.
not as think as i smart i am
If I could but live my life over again.
Knowing what I know now, and if I had just a little magical power, I'd have transitioned at 4, and would have gone on to study Sociology/Political Science. I talk frequently with people not from the US or even England, and I find it absolutely astonishing what others believe.
Very narrowly, there is a curious sort of "dichotomy" in the views that many of my overseas aquaintances have regarding 9/11. Even talking about it quickly arouses some to anger, but I feel it must be spoken of. One of my friends thinks that it was a Jewish plot. Another thinks it was a plot by Bush, thus inciting war, to gain access to the oil in Iraq, because those in the know believe that the largest crude oil reserves in the world lie there.
During my old days of Christian fundamentalisim, there were constant rumors of the evil plots of satan. There was also mention of the seven families that supposedly rule the world and change history for their ends. For me, it became a question of: can I change it? The answer was always no.
All this is pretty convoluted to me, and I eventually just sit back and consign all this to the history books. Who knows if we will ever know all that happened. At the very least, we know that the 19 who did it all were Saudi, and either extremely sick or simply evil. Who can gain a telling look into the minds of those who are willing to give their lives to a cause. Personally, I think a chemical analysis of the blood of those men, were it available, might find the existence of a "suicide drug" there.
I worked in Construction most of my life, but never on anything taller than 4 stories. A few years ago, I was told by a man who had spent a long period of his life working on high rises, to include some of the tallest buildings in the world, that all buildings over 10 stories have built in demolition charges in them so that in the event of a collapse, the charges all go off so that it will fall straight down and not topple over. I lack the engineering expertise to further comment on it, though I do have my own opinion.
The central point to the incidents surrounding 9/11 is that about 3000 people died that should not have, and those who died, likely had no role in the causation of it. I simply can not imagine anger at another ruling my life that way, though for a time I was thinking of torching a few churches and Muslim mosques. Thankfully, my anger has cooled, and I am so close to the end that little of it matters to me. It will be up to those who follow to do a better job than I have. I wish them luck.
Much peace.
Gwen
I've also heard these,
I've also heard these, except for the last one.
"One of my friends thinks that it was a Jewish plot. Another thinks it was a plot by Bush, thus inciting war, to gain access to the oil in Iraq..."
"...rumors of the evil plots of satan. There was also mention of the seven families that supposedly rule the world and change history for their ends."
"... that all buildings over 10 stories have built in demolition charges in them so..."
Which brings to mind:
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Alice in Wonderland.
I think there are far too many people in the world who are like the Queen.
Kris
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
Not that familiar with Alice in Wonderland
But I think I remember that perhaps the Cheshire Cat sat on a limb smoking his pipe and blowing smoke rings and saying something like "It doesn't matter dear" or "Frankly Charlotte, I don't give a damn." No, that was other movie what ever they call it, "Broken Wind" was it? No, silly that was "Broken Arrow" or some such thing.
Hmmmm, where did I put my dialator?
Gwendolyn
Last night...
...at the house-filk I go to, we sang, as one of the last songs, "United 93" by Cat Faber, which I post here for you:
I was getting ready for work that morning, and had been watching the news for the weather report before I left. I had turned away to look for something just as they switched to the feed from new york, and turned back to see the North tower in flames. I watched the second plane crash into the South tower. I heard the announcement and saw the images of the third plane and its strike at the Pentagon. I heard the reports of the crash in the fields of Pennsylvania.
I never made it to work that day.
At the time, I couldn't cry. The tears just wouldn't come, as if some part of me just couldn't believe the evidence of my eyes. They came later. In a way, I don't think I've ever really stopped crying since, as they come far, far to easily every time I think of that, or of those who've lost their lives and honor and dignity since.
It brings back the sick, scared, angry, painful, sad feeling, tighter and sharper, every time I hear an extremist blasphemously invoke that event. They make themselves even more vile, hard though it may be to conceive of such, than those supremely evil so-called men who planned, authorized, and committed that horrid crime.
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
-Liz
Successor to the LToC
Formerly known as "momonoimoto"
Requiem For A Soldier
And who pays the consequences of our every action? The Soldier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2D5UaNO5HE
Gwen