Reflections on 9-11 Ten Years Later

10 years ago I was then as now in Switzerland, although for different reasons (we live here now, but were vacationing then) perhaps the safest place on the planet, and the remoteness of the event in some ways amplified its urgency and confusion.  What on earth was happening and why?   My sister-in-law had flown back to London only the day before and she was the one who called us in the afternoon to tell us to turn on the TV, that "they were flying airplanes into buildings."  
The United States seemed like a different, more solemn place when we returned in late September, 2001.   There were flags everywhere and a sense of unity that I had never sensed before.  Being an American, something I took for granted, seemed almost palpable.  It was sad that it took such a horrific crime to remind us of what generations passing through Ellis Island knew - that the 7% of the planet lucky enough to call themselves American live in a special place, if for no other reason than that we can respond with such shock and horror to the idea that violent death can come literally and suddenly from a cloudless blue sky.  This is a reality known all too well in places from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine and Israel, from the Sudan to the Congo to Somalia.  War with its random mass killing of innocents who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time was supposed to happen There, not Here.  

The fact that we continue to feel that this fundamental, un-written rule had been violated is part of what makes our country so great on one hand but so insensitive on the other.  American Exceptionalism quickly took on an ugly, retributive, militaristic form and the horrors of that day were used to justify at least two wars and countless actions of questionable legality whose horrors made the deaths on 9-11 a rounding error in an unspeakable international body count.   I hope that a decade out, we can unlearn the false lessons of 9-11, the ones politicians used to start wars and win elections, and take time to reflect on our common humanity, on the insanity of the idea that whether you live or die, whether you have a right to an existence free from random terror whether from suicide bombers or attack helicopters or predator drones, should be a function of where you happened to be born and whether someone somewhere was mad enough about something your government did that they were willing to make your life so much collateral damage.   

I remember the Parisian headlines declaring that "We are all Americans now" or the candlelight vigils for the 9-11 victims in Tehran and the Gaza strip.  I remember our media intoning solemnly about how we would be forever changed, a truth that for the 99.8% of Americans who did not lose a loved one that day lasted for all of 6 weeks.  We quickly returned to partisan bickering, with the party in charge during the greatest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor managing to turn it into a megaphone moment then use it to justify two wars and some of the most viciously dishonest political campaigning seen in any Western country since Germany in the 1930s.  Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost 3 limbs in Vietnam, sponsor of the bill creating the Department of Homeland Security, was called an ally of al Qaeda because he did not think it was right to strip federal workers transferred to the new department of their existing benefits as Bush proposed.  Another decorated Vietnam combat veteran had his service record impugned by a well-financed campaign that introduced a new synonym for slick, dishonest, character association into our political vocabulary:  swift-boating.  You were either for Bush or against him, and he expanded the size and power of the federal government in ways the Tea Party (had it been invented yet) should by all rights have been up in arms against.  Tax cuts in a time of war, historically unprecedented, were not only continued, but deepened.   They neither paid for themselves nor stimulated the economy.  Disastrous deregulation of everything from coal mines to deep oil drillers to the financial industry (who lobbied hard to make sure that options on mortgage backed securities were not regulated as insurance products) created disaster after disaster until we now face a fiscal shortfall that those who intoned about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein's WMD are telling us is the next imminent threat they have a great idea about how to fix.  

So we are firing teachers and first responders (after the Party of 9-11 voted several times to refuse to pay for the healthcare of first responders who risked everything to search for survivors in a smoking toxic pit), closing public health clinics, defunding Planned Parenthood (97% of whose services have nothing to do with abortion and who provide life-saving pap smears and mammograms to a disproportionately indigent population) and at least 45,000 Americans every year, over 15 9-11's worth of people, die for want of health insurance in one of the world's most prosperous countries (the battle now is being shifted to coverage for cancer, which 9-11 volunteers are being denied despite the study published in Lancet showing a 19% higher risk of cancer among those working in The Pit).  But because we don't see those 45,000 dead, half a million perhaps since 9-11 itself, jumping from a smoking building, our telegenic culture has trouble mobilizing a concerted response, even though insuring our children is much less costly and involves far less sacrifice than combating politically-inspired violence, something our cash-strapped government somehow managed to find a spare trillion dollars to fight.
I was as angry, saddened, and heart-broken about the anguish of those in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on that awful day a decade ago, but our response to it has taken the lives of so many more innocents, most of whom are not commemorated or even acknowledged, many of them Americans, that my response to the memories of that day are tempered by awareness of what followed.  Until and unless we can never again allow such radical, disproportionate, and self-defeating behavior in the face of politically-inspired violence, behavior that crowds out efforts to address things that really do kill Americans in significant numbers, then we are only one attack away from the next catastrophic over-response.  The fact that no one in our government went to prison for ordering torture, indefinite detention without charges, or for illegal spying on Americans suspected of no crime, whereas Republican governors are spending billions suing that same government for forcing citizens to stop free-riding our healthcare system does not inspire hope. 

And for those who want us to believe that Greed is Good, that without further lowering of their taxes the top 1% of earners will refuse to hire anyone (or anyone in America, at least), let's remember those unionized government employees who ran into burning buildings when everyone else (including many of those in the top 1% who would later join the Tea Party and support slashing the funding for their rescuers' healthcare, pensions, and right to collective negotiation) was running out did not do what they did because of the promise of a fat bonus.  I doubt anyone in the police departments of the Port Authority or of New York City thought of their top marginal tax rate before deciding whether or not to help make sure everyone they could help had been rescued.  The America that inspired the world on the day and in the weeks since was not about getting and spending but about giving and serving.  Government service had not yet become an open term of derision in the right wing of one party, and no one cared if the bodies found in the rubble were Democrats, Republicans, independents, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or agnostic.  We were all Americans and when we are at our best it is not about greed or materialism.   We are better than that and if we hold the ideals of sacrifice and shared purpose, of not leaving anyone behind to die whether in a burning building or for want of healthcare, up as the model of what we can be, then there might just be hope for us all.