Another 9/11/2001 Post

I am sure these are all over the place right now, but I believe I have a different take.  I remember hearing the news while driving to work.  I had overslept that morning and called in to tell people I was on my way.  The responder didn't give me the news but sounded oddly despondent.  I heard the news on the car radio and my immediate, unconsidered response was, "It finally happened."

While I didn't think about it continually I was sure that with constant terrorist attacks in Israel and US interventions around the world for decades that eventually some angry people would start setting off bombs in the USA.  To me it was just another tragedy, the sort of terrible thing that happens around the world every year.  To me it was somehow an ordinary horrible event.

I don't think I have since heard anyone else have a similar reaction, possibly my father in his somewhat off-hand way.  Around the world this was considered a special occurrence.  Frequently it was described as something that "would change the world forever."  In the United States it was generally thought of as a national trauma, a deep wound to the American psyche. 

The question for me was why it was considered such a terrible event?  I have mentioned previously that it couldn't have been the loss of life or the suffering of people.  This isn't meant to demean the tragedy in terms of the horror for those who died, and for those who heroically tried to help, just that car accidents or cancer are just as traumatic for those involved and they kill vastly more people than 9/11/2001.  I deliberately give the full date because there have been eleven 9/11's since the attack, and we will have many more.  According to estimates more than seven times as many Americans died as a result of lack of health care during the same year.

I believe the specialness had two components.  The first was that it was live in camera and then repeated over and over again.  This was an event where the entire nation, perhaps the whole world, was an eyewitness to a tragedy.  Most of us go through our lives without viewing such tragedy.  At the present rate of vehicular fatalities a person alive today who lives for another hundred years has a 1% chance of dying in such an accident.  A third the chance of being murdered.  Most Americans go through their lives without witnessing a fatal tragedy in person.  We are generally insulated from trauma. 

The second component was that this happened in the United States, the mainland of which had not been attacked in living memory.  Having your country attacked was a unique experience for every American, the idea was just not conceivable for most Americans.  The warm cocoon of American safety was broken.

I am sure at one moment I had hoped that this would be a rude awakening for the country that there was a world out there full of people with their own dreams, desires and problems.  That what America had done for the previous five decades actually had a dramatic effect on the lives of other people.  That "protecting American interests" partly resulted in people dying, screaming in agony from their wounds, mothers crying for their dead children.  I didn't ever think that war would be eliminated from the American psyche, just that the consequences would become more real.  I was completely wrong.

From the determination that "this must never happen again" and the depiction of an enemy that "hates us for our freedom" the predominant response was a desire for vengeance.  As a result hundreds of thousands of people have died, almost none of whom had anything to do with the attack whatsoever.  There was overwhelming support for a war with Afghanistan in the United States, for most the concept of not launching a war was something that was inconceivable. 

Why am I even writing this post?  There have been four 9/11's since I started this blog and I have not written on any of those occasions about this.  The difference for me had two components.  One was the arbitrary nature for humans of the number ten.  This is eleven years after the attack and it is still a special day.  The second point was the flags along the streets of my residential neighborhood and flags at half mast at churches and stores and model homes at new subdivisions.  The nation is still in mourning eleven years later, far longer than most of us would openly grieve for the death of a loved one, and this mourning is expressed through naked expressions of nationalism.

While I certainly don't wish for their to be another terrorist attack in the USA (or anywhere else, an important point) I wish for the time when America as a nation (not those involved) can put this into the category of historical tragedy, something suffered everywhere in the world, tragically ordinary.

There are few things that trouble me more than a nation's flag in front of every house and every business.