September 11, 2003: Lessons Learned Two Years On [View All]

[Plaid Adder]

Wrote this up this morning. Its permanent home is http://www.livejournal.com/users/plaidder . I wish peace and comfort for everyone who is still mourning a personal loss--here, and around the world.

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Last night on my way home from work I stopped halfway and bought a bag of Smooth 'n' Meltys. I ate most of them on the way home, thereby making myself sick to my stomach. I was about a quarter of the way into the bag before I realized why I was doing this. When my grandmother moved into her retirement community, one of the things she did to keep herself sane was work in the little gift shop they had on the premises. They sold Smooth 'n' Meltys and she always had some around the apartment in her many candy dishes. I associate them with visiting her there, and with visiting her there before her health and mental acuity went into decline and she had to move into smaller and smaller apartments with more and more nursing and of course eventually give up the gift shop. She was living in a single room by the time she finally died, years after life had really stopped being any use to her, on September 11, 2000.

I am bad with anniversaries (except for my own) but obviously part of my subconscious brain made the connection before I remembered the coincidence. I do remember that at the time, one of the things that Liza and I talked about was how glad we were that both of our grandmothers (in each case, it was the last grandparent we had) had not lived to see it. It would have confused and frightened them terribly; and what came after would only have been worse. On the DU forums once, during the height of the duct tape and plastic farce, I read with empathy and anger one poster's ballistic rant about how Tom Ridge had terrified his 86 year old neighbor and he had to go over and try to calm her down. Tom Ridge has a lot to answer for; when the Homeland Security Department put up its website, I visited, and sent them an email containing the words, "Stop scaring my sister." She and my brother live in Manhattan and they were both in town for the World Trade Center attacks, as was my father, who was in town doing something else. Lynn didn't like it when the terror alert went to orange and the cops in New York started carrying machine guns. Who can blame her.

I can't exactly say that I was unaffected by the national frightfest that followed 9/11/01. When we went on vacation in October the anthrax scare was in full swing and I spent some time rediscovering that wonderful feeling you get when a panic attack is imminent. I hadn't felt anything like that since my depression during the Bad Year. And the anxiety might have lasted for longer if it hadn't been for that stupid deer.

In November 2001 Liza was driving home from taking a dep somewhere far to the south of us and a deer trying to cross the road ran into her car. She was only slightly injured and everything turned out all right; but it was a life-changing experience for me. In our lesbian book group we had read 3 novels that year about women trying to come to terms with the sudden death of a long-term partner, and in 2 of them the cause of death was a car accident. So when you hear a knock on the door and go down to find your next door neighbor telling you that your 'friend' has been in a car accident...

I wrote about the whole thing here. The summary is basically this: I know what the worst thing in the world would be, and that's losing her. The deer who totaled her car taught me that the worst thing in the world can happen at any time, for any reason, and that it is not and cannot be one hundred percent preventable. That being true, we just have to make our peace with that and go on, and try to forget that we are always dancing along the edge of the precipice. Intellectually, I knew that already, but there's learning, and then there's learning.

What else have I learned in the two years after the day that everything changed but we all went on with our normal lives so that the terrorists wouldn't have won? It's all more or less an unfolding of that basic lesson: everything we love can be lost. The most painful part of this has been understanding that this law applies to the entire world--and watching my own government callously inflict the worst thing in the world on thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq. As Americans we get used to the things we were born with; we take it for granted that the death of one of our loved ones is a tragedy for which life will pause, for a day or two at least, and give us the time and space in which to decently grieve. Indeed, by continuing to commemorate the day, we are extending that time and space for ourselves; and I would not want to begrudge that to anyone, it's how it should be. But it makes our response--and by 'our' I mean 'our government's'--to the tragedy all the more indefensible. We brought death like a plague to Afghanistan and Iraq; sudden, violent, unnecessary deaths at the hands of nervous and heavily armed American soldiers are a daily occurrence in Baghdad now, and will be until the occupation is over. Grief must be crushing these people. How do you grieve when eleven members of your family are cut to pieces by machine gun fire at a checkpoint? How do you grieve when you know that the next day, you will see or hear of another tragedy just as bad, or worse?

Yesterday Liza came home from her uncle's funeral. She says the crowd was enormous and I believe it; he was a wonderful man and he died too soon. I have heard about him for 15 years but I only knew him for the last two or three, because it wasn't until Liza's own grandmother died a few months after mine did that I met her extended family. George made it his business to welcome me into the clan, and I will always remember him fondly for that, and for the beautiful way in which he used to rip on George Bush's many perfidies. He was an old-style liberal, active in the civil rights movement and involved in his community and, Liza's mother said, "with a great fellow-feeling for the poor." He has left a big empty space in the world, and all the people close to him are feeling it very hard right now, especially his wife, who now has to try to cope with the one thing that I am truly terrified of, the worst thing in the world.

The personal is political, they say. This is why I marched: because I wanted to stop the worst thing in the world from happening to more people. It did not, of course, work; but I'm not done yet, and I'm not sorry I tried either. As awful as the past two years have been, I have learned a lot from them. I have learned the value of taking it to the street, after a lifetime of doing all my work inside my head or on a computer; I am learning, slowly, how not to be afraid of my own government; and I have learned that my hatred of the abuses perpetrated by my government springs partly from an actual and real love for my country, something I had previously thought was something people said they believed in but didn't exist, like the tooth fairy. I have learned a lot about the emotional aspects of nationalism, after having spent a lot of time analyzing the rhetorical side of it. And I have learned not to take the way we live in this country for granted. By which I mean not just to appreciate what I have, but to be angry every day that we are making that kind of life utterly impossible for many, many people all over the world, in order that we may convince ourselves that we are slightly less likely to suffer.

Fear of vulnerability is the root of all evil; I knew that already. My hope for the next September 11 is that by then, more of us will realize that, and be willing to make ourselves vulnerable in order that the rest of the world might finally have some peace. It might happen. Since July, things have started to shift; it is possible that by 2004 we will have regime change here. That would be something. For now, what can you do on a day like today, except to hope that everyone who is grieving will be touched by some kind of comfort and hope, and that we are all able, one day, to use what these years have taught us.
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Peace,

The Plaid Adder