Random thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks ...
20 years ago today I was in my parents’ kitchen in Romania, watching with stopped breath and open mouth the horrors of the 9-11 attacks. I lived in the US at the time but I was on vacation for two weeks, visiting my family in Romania. I had climbed to the top of one of the Towers less than two years earlier and when I saw that plane hit it all I could think about was how massive a number of people that meant would be dead! You knew when you saw those sky-scrapers how many thousands of people it housed. I could not imagine what would happen to them now. When the buildings collapsed, the unknown faces of those thousands of people kept playing in front of my eyes like a morbid slideshow. Unstoppable. Horrific.
Another thing hit close to home for me: when
I watched the towers collapse, the anchors repeated the names of the flights
that had been hijacked and they kept saying that the flights had taken off from
the Dulles airport in DC. I realized
that that was the airport where my flight to Europe had taken off only days earlier.
I had chills down my spine: I was in the same airport as those terrorists! Oh,
God! Could that have been me on those planes? Everyone who has ever flown could
have related to that fear but especially those, like me, who were in-between
planes at that time, knowing full-well, they’d have to brave another flight to
make it home.
Lots of people died that day – at The
Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania, too, but for some reason the collapse of those
two towers is what stopped the hearts and the breathing of an entire planet! As
you watched the images on TV of people jumping
out of the windows of The Twin Towers towards their sure death, repeatedly, ad
nauseam, you could feel how every soul of the world was looking for someone
else’s hand to clutch, for someone, anyone, to hug, to ensure they are not
alone and not abandoned in that vacuum of sheer pain. You could feel
that everyone who had any heart left felt the same horror and the
same grief, and the same anger as you felt. This
was the togetherness people are talking about now, that we should be awaken to …
the togetherness that we all need, as humans, as compassionate beings when
times get tough.
I remember as if it were yesterday my first
two thoughts after watching the events unfold: first, I was thinking that the
US will never allow me to get back to my home which at the time was Greensboro,
NC. I was not a citizen yet. I had gotten my temporary Green Card just the year
before, so I was for sure not going to be allowed in the country – the announcements
that the US does not allow anyone but citizens to return to the US was made by many
US Embassies in many countries including
in Romania almost immediately after the
attacks. I remember this scared me terribly as moving to America was my
life-long dream. My husband was in the US and my new life, the way I had built
it. My hopes for the future were all here, in the US. I was terrified this one
act of terrorism would kill my future for me, my life-long work and would
ground me in Romania.
The second thought was “oh, man, America
will first get together and pray after this. That’s what they do: they first, pray.
But man, after that, they will be pissed! They will crush whoever did this. I
feel sorry for them.” We did not know right from the beginning who had done
this. I was sure, though, this was another country, another power, not the US.
I knew a war would be coming but never in my worst dreams did I think that war
would span for the next 20 years! I knew whatever war was coming would be
brutal, given the 20th century’s advancement in arms, and I feared
what that’ll do to the world and to each of us, individually. I was wondering
if we would be able to travel freely anymore, if I would be able to come back
to Romania and see my family there, in the future, if America was going to wage
war on … whoever did this … and involve other powers in this war as well?!
America did pray right after September 11. Country-wide
vigils and charity concerts abounded. Charity to 9-11 victims sprouted
everywhere. People looked up to the heroes of 9-11. Everyone swore they would
never forget.
Giuliani, the Mayor of New York at the time
of the attacks, became “America’s Mayor.” For all his faults, lies, and
illegalities, for all of his Republicanism, my liberal friends loved him
and touted his accomplishments and how he brought the city, the first
responders together and what an incredibly great job he did handling the
aftermath of this tragedy. How can you handle it, really?! But
that, he did. After that, it seemed like we, as a people, were not divided in
camps, anymore – albeit very briefly. The lines that separated us because of
different political views, different tax views and views on how one should
handle the economy and what it means to be patriotic faded. We were all
thinking as Americans, together in one common thought: “who did this to us?
They would pay dearly. Let’s hold out hands together and pray for those that we
lost. Let’s be together. It hurts less when we’re holding hands.” – it looked
as if we were saying …
As I was in Romania, my US friends,
coworkers, and relatives flooded me with messages of “come back home,
safely”, “how are you?”, “what do people say there?” (meaning in Europe, in
Romania). I never felt alone. I was with one half of my family, my blood half,
but my other half, the one I had chosen for myself, was hailing back, not
forgetting me, from across The Pond. For all our differences, we were all one.
And I am sure that what brought us together was not our true belief that all of
a sudden Giuliani was a nice guy and Bush
stopped being an idiot overnight, but that
need for togetherness in front of horror, that need for holding another’s hand
to cross the dark pit left in front of us by those planes going down. That
simple, human, vulnerability, unaccounted for by much fanfare or glamor, but
our simpleness as humans that needed to be held …
I have always believed that what sets Americans
apart from many other nations is their individualism – their obsession with
themselves, their lack of awareness that they are not alone in the world, that the
consequence of their actions affects others. But during those days, I saw an America
where people stopped for just a minute and started to be aware of their
neighbor’s pain, of their neighbor’s loss, of their ability to help or be
compassionate. All because it could have happened to any of us.
The US did allow me to get back – they opened
the borders for US citizens and Green-Card holders alike in the
following days. I remember boarding my flight from Germany at the time and military
American personnel with automatic guns were supervising the boarding. They made
us empty all of our carryon bags, and even questioned whether we were hiding
explosives in our (film) cameras, they body-searched us (a first of many, many
others to come), and questioned us for hours before they allowed everyone to
board. It was terrifying and reassuring at the same time.
But it was then, in Germany, only about 10
days or so from September 11, when the American individualism showed itself
again: people were frustrated and angry that they were being searched. How
dare they think I’m a terrorist?! Completely missing the point! Although
there were American soldiers flanking the departure gate, although a United Airlines
flight (the same airline whose planes had been hijacked 10 days earlier!) was
waiting at the gate, Americans were upset that they are treated
as if they were terrorists. To me, this was reassuring. To everyone else, it
was an infringement to their freedom, forgetting that what the military was
protecting was precisely that freedom.
Ever since, I wonder: when we do say we
come together in times of crisis, do we really come together, or
do we say that as some sort of a slogan that just sounds well; as some sort of
generic statement that we know sounds good, but which does not truly come from
the heart?!
And do we really come ever
together, despite all cost to us? Or do we come together when and if it’s
convenient to us? When it’s not infringing on our freedom?! Is
patriotism not a selfless display of altruism? A complete abandon of the “I” in
favor of protecting the “many”?
20 years later today, people all over the
internet are saying we need to remember how we came together then. We need to remember
how, despite all of our differences, we all have a common goal – that of being
free, protected, and that of ensuring we all live in peace. This is all true. But
do we even really believe that we can strive for that common goal anymore?
I have felt so defeated and so alone in the
past few years, the whole country growing angrier, and more violent, more inconsiderate,
more careless, and more disconnected, that I really don’t see how we could ever
think of the other selflessly, and purposefully taking our own person from the
equation. What’s worse: I don’t think we can even acknowledge another’s
merits, when we see them as different in any way than us. I feel like the first
thing we do nowadays is look for differences between us and not commonalities.
Some folks are saying today that they pray that
we can see again our togetherness from 20 years ago before another
tragedy happens to remind us how we can be all one and be there for one another.
But has that tragedy not already happened? Have the past 5 and 2 years (and
before that, even!) not been anything but an ongoing tragedy, and open wound,
bleeding, for all of us, and we still, don’t see one another?! More
than 650,000 people died of Covid alone in the past year and a half. Add to
those people who died of hate crimes in the past few years, people who died in
wildfires and hurricanes, people who died from hunger and lack of medicine
because of lack of healthcare, just to name a few … Those are infinitely more (possibly
preventable) deaths than the ones we saw at 9-11.
When the cameras are off and the social
media sleeps (does it ever?) and we’re not trying to fit in with the rest of
the world by saying what everyone says (“we’re in this together”, “we’re one”,
etc), when we dive deep into our heart, do we ever really feel like we did
then, when we watched the towers collapse for the first time: do we feel in the
dark for another hand to clutch on? For another person to be close to us so we
can share the grief? Or do we stubbornly believe that “I” is enough in this mad
world?
I believe we too often forget that grief
hurts the same whether you’re this nationality or another, of this political
belief or of another. Grief sees no color, no sex, no culture, no age, no
country … Somehow, we have become blind to that.
What elevates us as humans, what we all (should)
seek now more than ever is that simple, heartfelt, visceral togetherness of not
being alone in the face of grief, horror, and pain. What brings us together is
that first instinctual thought of “oh, God, can that be me out there?” - that is where true compassion springs from (“Do
onto others as you would have them do unto you …”): that however dark a tragedy
is, it could happen to any of us. So, step with care …
Can we find that now deep,
deep into our souls? Not because it sounds good or it looks good under a hashtag,
but because we truly filter the tragedies of the world through our hearts and
we know how it would feel if it were us?! Can we do it?! Or are we too shallow
and clueless in our ivory towers to allow us to even ask these questions
anymore?!
I am not trying to belittle the 9-11-2001
attacks. Saying they were horrid, unnatural, and mind-stopping is an understatement.
But what I am trying to say is: we should pay attention to our every day and
just re-learn to be human again, the very same way we were so painfully reminded
that we are human on that dark day in history.
I hope humanity is not completely lost and I
hope that one day soon we would wake it before all is lost. Because this
is the only thing that might get us through the pain that is here now.
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