And so another 9/11 has come and gone.
9/11/2001 began in confusion for me. I was recently unemployed, had been up late, and overslept. I was awakened by my neighbor knocking on my door. I grabbed my keys and stumbled blearily to the door, where he told me two jetliners had flown into the World Trade Center and knocked it down, and that another had hit the Pentagon. He suggested I come up to watch the news with him. I told him I'd be up soon and shut the door. As I showered, dressed, and woke up, I convinced myself that it was some kind of sick joke, that there must be some overly serious drama on TV that my friend mistook for reality. As I walked up the stairs I felt lighthearted, convinced that this would be some kind of big mistake and we'd have a good laugh about it and go out to lunch together.I don't think I really felt anything while I watched the news. It was... unreal to me. I'd just been at the WTC a few months before. I could still feel the rough paint over cold steel of the handrails of the observation deck in my hands. The idea that it was gone was just... foreign. It had no place in my mind. I knew it was true, and yet I had no feeling of acceptance of it.
We watched as the networks endlessly repeated footage of airliners crashing into the WTC buildings about where my office used to be, many years before. It would be three months before I would know for sure that none of the people I used to work with there had been in the building yet.
We watched as Air Force One hopped from airport to airport, and Mr. Bush made occasional vague remarks that neither told us anything nor reassured us of our safety.
And, we watched as Tony Blair, Prime Minister of England, came on TV. "This is not a battle between the United States of America and terrorism," he said, "but between the free and democratic world and terrorism. We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world." My friend and I were moved to tears, and after a minute or so my friend said "That's right, they remember how to speak English over there."
At that, I decided I needed a break from watching my former workplace repeatedly destroyed on television. I walked downstairs to my home, into my sewing room, and I sewed a United States Flag. I had to take squares of fabric from my quilting work to make the blue field and the red stripes. I made a stencil and used fabric paint to paint on the stars, so they'd be done fast. I hung it on the front of our house that day. I've never been given to displays of patriotism. However, it was the only thing I could think of to express my solitude with my fellow citizens, my grief over what had occurred.
9/11 brought out the best side of Americans. New York's Finest laid their lives on the line to save others. With calm and dignity, ordinary people reached out to help ordinary people. Public television showed children in New York making cookies to hand out to people fleeing from the wreckage or heading in to provide relief. Chefs of New York's top restaurants banded together to serve 5 star food three meals a day to rescue workers. Corporations donated cell phones and free airtime to emergency professionals. For one shining moment, we were one people, indivisible, unstoppable, simultaneously the most powerful people on earth, and the most humane.A few days later, I took my flag down. I felt that it was time. Neverending grief would mean the terrorists had won. I had shown my respect, now it was time for the rest of us to pick up the pieces and live out our lives as best we can. I was supposed to be in the World Trade Center the first time it was bombed, but rescheduled my business trip just a few days earlier. I know what it is to be targeted by terrorists. I went back to the WTC and went back to work, and thought that as Americans we would all see it as our duty to stand up and survive.
But, the rest of the nation didn't seem to see it that way. Before
9/11, business had been picking up, I'd been getting calls about interviews for jobs, we seemed to be on track for a recovery from the economic downturn which took place at the end of 2000. After 9/11, nobody would call back, job listings disappeared, and everyone crawled into their shell.Christmas 2001 was marked by hideous displays of "ornaments" which mixed patriotism and religion in an unholy jumble. I'm fairly sure most priests and ministers would agree that the baby Jesus was not holding two American Flags in his hands in the manger.
Within months the French were being villified for not going along with all of Mr. Bush's warmongering. The jackbooted, jingoistic "patriots" among us were suddenly talking about "freedom fries", as if renaming the french fry would somehow make anything better. (The French Embassy's statement on the matter was that they didn't care, French Fries are really Belgian anyway.) It made me sick to watch America's first ally being made the subject of petty jibes. Benjamin Franklin, who signed our treaty of friendship with France, must be spinning in his grave.
On the Fourth of July, 2002, I sat on a pier in Marblehead Massachusetts and was served French food and French Champagne as I watched the fireworks in Red, White, and Blue - the colors of the French flag. I remember who my friends are.
On 9/11/2002 I hung the flag I made on the front of the house again. I took it down at the end of the day, for fear that someone might mistake it for approval of the jingoistic nonsense that had passed for patriotism in the past year.
In 2003 I spent some time in New York. I like to go to New York. I visit my friends there, and I see broadway shows. I use an online service that lets me bid a price for a hotel room, and I get whatever location they can find that will give me a room for the price I bid. One time I ended up at a lovely Hilton downtown... across the street from Ground Zero. I didn't ever want to see that. In my heart the Twin Towers still stood, as they had all my life, a testament to mankind's ability to create ever greater engineering feats. In my memory tourists still strolled casually through gleaming white marble lobbies and gazed down in wonder at New York from the improbably high observation deck. Instead there was a hole in the ground. A gleaming white hole in the ground, surrounded by a fence in which people stuck flowers.
The economic recovery never took place. Good, full time, professional positions have been disappearing, and the recovery of jobs which has been much touted by the administration has consisted mostly of part time jobs in retail and food service. An increasing percentage of everyone I know is unemployed, and I wonder how much longer this can go on until the shantytowns of the Great Depression return, and I'm living in one.
The preservation of Freedom didn't take place either. When the US military locks up hundreds of foreign nations on US soil for years, violates their Geneva Convention rights, and tortures them, when American citizens are detained without charge and held without access to the courts, when the man in the oval office argues to the Supreme Court that he and anyone acting on his orders are above the law, when speaking out against the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is considered "disloyal", when legislatures and executives across the nation are frantically trying to amend state and federal constitutions to take away the civil rights of the citizenry, Freedom has been irreparably harmed.
Now the reigning political party rushes to install "black box" voting machines, fully computerized, which keep no paper trail to prove if the vote has been recorded accurately or to allow a recount. Until these machines are eliminated, we will just have to take their word for it that they accurately recorded and obeyed our vote.
For three years now I've watched as everything I love and believe in about my country has been slowly destroyed by a so-called "President" who didn't win the popular vote, whose win in the electoral college depended on the unlawful disenfranchisement of over 20,000 voters at the personal order of a governor who happened to be his brother.
For three years now I've watched as that man in the White House made us much less safe. Frantic "security" in airports takes nail clippers from elderly women and forces nursing mothers to drink their own milk to prove it isn't toxic and evacuates entire airports after the discovery of an innocent microphone in a musician's luggage, yet fails to address the fact that the hijackers' weapons may have been smuggled onto the aircraft before they got on. I've watched as my country started a hundred twenty billion dollar war with an oil-rich middle-eastern nation on the assurance that they had something to do with 9/11 and were threatening us with Weapons of Mass Destruction (insert ominous music here), only to find that they weren't involved and didn't have said weapons, and now they're a haven for all those who wish to destroy us. I've watched as my local subway system instituted random searches of innocent passengers' bags in the name of "security" and in violation of the bill of rights. I've watched as the Secret Service closed off half the city of Boston, throwing eastern Massachusetts into chaos and further harming our already ravaged economy, in the name of "security".
And 1000 American soldiers have died in the name of that pointless war, as the administration cuts back on veterans' benefits.
And they're still holding at least several hundred people captive in violation of their Geneva Convention rights.
And I'm still looking for work that will pay my rent.
This year, I didn't fly the flag I made on 9/11. I don't feel so proud this year, I just feel hurt.
I beg you all to consider, as another 9/11 has passed, has your life been improved in the last three years? Has anything actually gotten better? Are your friends and family getting jobs, or losing them? Are those that have jobs earning a fair wage for reasonable work, or are they being underpaid and overworked? Do you really believe we are safer with faux-security in our airports and the entire Arab world enraged at us for the US's unprovoked attack on Iraq? Do you really believe our descendents will be more prosperous with a half-trillion-dollar (and growing) federal budget deficit hanging over them like the sword of damocles? Is it really more important to you to make sure gay couples can't marry than to see your children grow up in freedom in a nation where people can afford food and shelter?
It's time that we all admit that Mr. Bush's policies have not only been an abject failure, but are slowly destroying all that we hold dear. In the name of 9/11 he's ruining this nation for his own political gain. I beg you to please vote against Mr. Bush this November. As a nation, and as a culture, we must change course now, while we still have a future.