Today, Which Is Tuesday

It is good that it is raining today. There have been five other 9/11s since the one that counts, but this is the first one to fall on a Tuesday. Stephen King wrote a story for an anthology a couple years ago in which his entire plot hinged on the attacks having occurred on a sunny--that part was right--Monday; as the copy editor I flagged it, marveling as I did how anyone could fail to remember that it had been a Tuesday, that the sky was a perfect shade of blue, what shoes they were wearing and what they held in their hands or passed in the street, what words were being spoken at the moment a building collapsed to dust--it seemed ludicrous, implausible, impossible that something so simple as that it was Tuesday might not be seared in the memory as deeply as every other detail of the day, and the ones that followed. This is what I wrote at the time.

People will be born today, others will die--from violence, war, sickness, injury, old age. Some will marry, divorce, get new jobs, win prizes, lose money. This date will carry a different meaning for them and their loved ones than it does in the larger American mind.

The question has arisen at what point do we let go. The short answer is never: memory may fade, but the changes wrought by the events are immutable and, like all of history, what we fail to recall we are doomed to relive. So rather than looking back at what happened in those 102 minutes of a sunny Tuesday morning in September six years ago, let us look instead at where we are today as a result.

More than 3000 people perished on this date six years ago as a result of the attacks; since then nearer to 4000 American servicepeople, and untold thousands of Iraqi people, have died in a war that was launched under false pretenses that revolve around the events of this date. On the train on which I am writing this, they make an announcement every day that our bags and
packages are subject to random--i.e., without showing due cause, as the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution calls for--search. We routinely submit to searches when entering buildings and ballparks and to games of TSA freeze tag; when asked, the majority say its for our own safety--they admit they are so terrified that they are willing to yield the rights that the founders fought and died for. Our government claims we are not patriotic if we protest this abrogation of our fundamental freedoms, and Rudy Giuliani, the fearmongers' heir apparent, is basing a presidential campaign on reminding people to look back and be afraid. If the purpose of terrorism is to spread terror among the populace so that actions are ruled by fear rather than reason . . . well, they did a good job of it. And we helped.

But you know all that.

How has my life changed in the microcosm? I never leave home without a flashlight and radio, and comfortable walking shoes. I never cross the 59th Street bridge without looking across at the animated advertising billboard over near the Long Island Expressway and being grateful to the wise person who changed it that day to read, simply, "Peace." I always leave my cats too much food, so they won't go hungry before someone comes for them if I don't make it home one day, and I prefer to travel before or after the height of rush hour. On my way to work as I pass the ribbons that wave from the Marble Church railings--yellow ones tagged with the names and ages of American soldiers dead in this war; blue and green for the uncounted Iraqi dead and the equally innumerable prayers for peace--I say my own silent prayer and wonder if we all had fought harder at the outset whether we might have slowed or stopped the juggernaut toward quagmire. (We didn't, I think, because we never believed it would happen so easily.) And I think how good our lives are by comparison to those who live with the daily reality of car bombs or starvation or painful death, and wonder how they find the strength.

It is well and good and necessary to build a memorial to what happened six years ago today, and to mark the anniversary, lest we forget this turning point in our history. Have we learned from it? I'm not sure we have. Maybe too little time has passed. Even six years later, the wounds are still open, at least here in New York. But if we're ever to heal, we must begin to examine what and whom we as a nation and individuals have become, and use that knowledge to serve the greater good.