It's been twenty years...

9/13

Heroes

 It’s been twenty years. We  have found our ways in public and private to commemorate what is important to us. I appreciated, for example, the Yankees and Mets wearing first responder hats like they did in 2001 and the Mets wearing “New York” on their chest instead of “Mets.” 

(Can you  remember when the NYPD were only heroes and Rudy Giuliani seems like the right guy at the right time?) 

How do we reflect on this anniversary? Everyone remembers  a time of great unity. All of us in the same boat. But I remember the passionate nightly Hyde Park debates in Union Square. The Square an interactive public art project with every inch of fence covered with missing persons posters, the equestrian statue of George Washington painted and graffitied, the votive candles, shrines.  It went on until the rains came and finally broke through the frozen in time sun shine. 

The debate raged between those who argued to make someone pay for this and those who adamantly declared Don’t use our grief as an excuse for your war.

For one brief moment, we had the opportunity to understand what it is to live in the world. In our woundedness we could be Baghdad, Beirut, Berlin. We could have found a connection with what the rest of the world experiences. But we chose to go another way.

For all the  recent rehabilitation of the public image of George Bush (thank you Donald Trump), we cannot forget that he led us into two unending wars. The war in Iraq especially  heinous as it was for no other reason than Oedipal hubris. (And maybe some  oil.) 

The end of the Afghan War came right on the cusp of the anniversary. And despite the declaration of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken  that “This is manifestly not Saigon,”  the optics were pretty much as Yogi said, deja vu all over again.  

I recall sitting in a dorm lounge at Yale Divinity School, the students cheering as the Viet Cong entered Saigon. There are no cheers for the Taliban. Though in reflection, if they took over that easily, they must have had some popular support. That’s worth reflection.

A friend of mine who is a Muslim peace activist asks us to look at our reactions to the Afghan resolution and see how much Islamophobia enters in. And she says that the situation, in the end, must be and will be resolved by Afghan Muslims.  

One of the lessons of 9/11 should  be that we cannot rebuild the world as we want it to be. Starting with Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve taken countless lives and accomplished …. ?

And despite warm memories of unity, 9/11 opened the doors to Islamophobia, xenophobia, Christian nationalism and the cartoon though deadly dangerous protofascist populism of Trump. 

When you look at the way our responses to 9/11 have affected how the world sees us, how divided we have become, well, maybe terrorism works better than we like to admit. 

We very much hang in the balance now.  The questions opened by 9/11 still waiting resolution. How we respond will define who we are and determine what future we have.

The most important lesson  of 9/11 for me is not about  the US but about New York City. I say often that our city hangs together by an everyday collective act of will. We choose to make it work. No army could force us, we do it on our own. This includes the 1000 or more graces we extend  to each other every  day just to keep it all going for one more day. The day of 9/11 saw us at our best because we do it every day. We chose to make it through without direction by politicians, army or police. And we did. That’s one reason I love living here. That I hold onto. That gives me hope.