The Obligatory 9/11 Anniversary Post

Everyone is turning their minds back to that moment ten years ago when the world shifted.  FB is full of "where were you then" posts, "commemorate the heroes" statuses, and people generally testing the tender edges of a wound that may not ever fully heal.  I remember in all of the media blitz going on at the time one of the talking heads saying that 9/11 was the day America's innocence ended.  I think that is probably about right.

I wasn't living in country at the time.  I was still in Japan.  It was late evening for us there with the time difference.  I'd cooked dinner, watched a movie, and when I turned the VCR off, I saw an image on the screen that looked familiar, but somehow wrong.  It still seemed to be a film of some kind.  It was, of course, the Twin Towers just after the first plane had hit.  As I began to understand through the confusion of my lack of Japanese that what I was seeing was NOT an action film but a live news feed from New York, the second plane hit.  

The university I taught at provided housing, neat little apaatos, for the gaijin staff.  My colleague lived just across from me, and although I don't remember covering the small distance between her apartment and mine, I do remember her, her boyfriend, and me sitting and staring at her TV (she had English language newsfeed) for hours as Japan's night and the horror in the United States unfolded.  We watched people make the decision to end their lives rather than burn, something I don't know if some audiences here saw.  We watched the towers come down.  And, because we had so few news options even though we were also pulling news feed from online, we also were in absolute terror because we kept hearing there were more planes in the air....more planes in the air....but nobody knew where they were....

We fought international phone lines congested beyond the point of their tolerance and an already overtaxed domestic grid trying to get through to our loved-ones back home as we sought that most basic of reassurances, the answer to the question everybody asks, "Are you okay?  Is everything okay at home?" It was hours, many many of them before we could get a connection through, and we waited eyes glued to the TV as we tried to piece together the information coming to us as the Pentagon was hit, as the other plane was taken down by those brave passengers who chose their own end rather than to be used as a tool against their nation.

The next day, the other American teacher and I stumbled through our classes in a daze.  The reaction to us was to be an indicator of the world's reaction.  So many were full of sympathy and grief, anger that anyone would commit an atrocity of that nature.  Japan has such a complicated set of emotions when it comes to acts of violence, but mostly, now, and most ironically now, thanks to the very nation they were extending sympathy toward, they value peaceful resolution above everything else.  And then there were those others...the woman from Ireland who told my friend that what had happened was really just too bad, but it was all our own fault, wasn't it?  The war protesters who sprang up in the middle of campus immediately and ran up to hand us flyers, bowed very formally, and ran away again, as if the two of us somehow were responsible for our nation's foreign policy....

Flying home after 9/11 was worlds different.  Everyone was scared:  passengers, airline crews, the men who suddenly appeared with assault weaponry in every place in the airport.  The first time I went home afterward, I flew the day the Shoe Bomber tried to take a plane out of the sky, and I went in through LAX.  I didn't know it had happened until I touched down in Jackson and my parents grabbed me and held me.  That's when I knew that we were never going to feel safe again.  

Of all the things we lost, of all the precious things that are gone, that were taken, that's the one I worry about the most.  Fear makes any creature do terrible things, self-destructive ones.  It is always sensible to take precautions for safety.  It is unwise not to care for one's wellbeing or to prevent danger when possible.  I worry, though, that after 9/11 we have slowly started to become afraid of everything, and in that way, we have begun to allow others to do things for us and to us, both our government and the people we're fighting against, that never would have been stood for before that date.  

9/11 stands as a dividing point in our nation's history.  I'm not sure yet what the ultimate outcome of it will be.  I hope that we are still in a period of change from it.  Today, there will be so much said and so much remembered of that day.  I hope that people will not use this as a moment to relight old flames of paranoia, divisiveness, and destruction.  Instead, let's remember some of the highest and most honorable things from that day.  There were other lessons to take from it, after all, other models shown, examples of some of the finest things we as people are capable of. Let's remember all those who gave of themselves that day, who conquered the fear instead.  Maybe if we can do that, then we can find a way back to a place of safety once again.