A few September 11th words

Last updated on: September 11, 2016 at 10:06 am by Jane the Actuary

A few September 11th words 2016-09-11T10:06:10-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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I’d been thinking about the fact that blogging has been light lately. Partly it’s a matter of lack of time, with more effort on other activities, and partly it’s a matter of just being so frickin’ discouraged with the craziness of our election right now. Neither Clinton nor Trump are fit to be president, and hopes that we’d receive some unexpected good news that there was a true alternative are moving from highly improbable to the “in what fantasy world do you live on?” category.

But today is the 15th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

My kids, of course, only know this as a history lesson, or, more precisely, a parent-provided history lesson.

My oldest was a toddler at the time of the attacks, and I was in the middle of getting myself and him ready for work and daycare when my husband called and said, “turn on the TV; something’s happened and CNN is frozen.” (This, of course, being in the days when one could access the internet at work, but breaking news sources were limited.) I turned it on just after the first plane had crashed, and watched as the second plane did likewise.

Throughout the day we all checked the news online, while at the same time trying to go about getting our work done, and thus learned that the towers fell via CNN reports. We returned home and, that night and for the next week or so, watched the continuous coverage, every evening, grateful that the baby was young enough so as to have no clue what was going on.

Of course, we were in suburban Chicago, not in New York. A neighbor had colleagues in one of the towers, we ourselves had no personal connection. But for the next week, the skies were eerily silent, and then it was startling afterwards to see planes when flights resumed again.

But we knew that our world would now be different.

For a time we all celebrated America, and the idea of Americans coming together. Flags were everywhere. There were benefit concerts for the families of the first responders (the scholarship funds must have in the end been enough to send every possible relative to Harvard!), reports of a rush to donate blood (ultimately, tragically, not needed), a tremendous desire to do something to help, and a conviction that we Americans would now join together rather than be divided by our differences.

That didn’t last long, did it?

And not just because the usual divisions resurfaced, but we had new ones, starting from the claims that 9/11 was an inside job, and all manner of further disputes on how to resolve the ongoing threat.

Now, admittedly this was all inevitable, and that brief moment of coming-together was the aberration, and couldn’t realistically have lasted forever. But the distance between that community in the aftermath, and where we are now — where your opponents are not just people you have disagreements with, but evil incarnate — is dismaying.

Image: own photograph

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