The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Awkward Anniversary

(Now enhanced with respiratory failure!)

Another September 11th - this time the fifth anniversary - and I'm not finding myself moved to say anything new. Not moved to say much of anything at all. Personal reminiscences and reactions to the tragedy abound, so they're out there to be easily found.

Even without trying, I see that Tammy chose to adopt part of another family's grief as her way of commemorating the event on a human scale. Meanwhile, her significant other commemorates the events from his own perspective.

In last year's entry it's clear that most of the focus was on the then-recent and ongoing wake of Katrina. For 9/11 itself I find that what I briefly noted last year still stands:

I gave some thought to writing something about 9/11 on yet another anniversary, but aside from continuing to be appalled by how it's been exploited almost daily to keep this administration and its policies afloat I have nothing to say.

Indeed, looking back to the previous year and the third anniversary, what I said then holds true for me today:

Being September 11th - three years, with a Leap Year tossed in having shifted it from a Tuesday to a Saturday - it's a good time to steer clear of the inevitable memorial pieces likely to be sprinkled through that frequent media misnomer "The News." Certainly, if one lost someone in the tragedies in New York, Western Pennsylvania or Washington, DC there's a point to personal memorials. My expectation is that there won't be many large events, however, that someone won't attempt to hijack for a political message.

Yes, all of that certainly holds true for me.

What remains through all of this is that I cannot honestly report that the events of September 11, 2001 - the fall of the towers and the death of thousands - really touched me directly in any way. I did not lose anyone to the best of my knowledge. I had never been to the towers, much less lived in New York. I empathize with the families and friends of those who died, but it would be a blatant lie to pretend that those people could mean much more to me than characters in a novel.

I can report no sense of outrage, then nor now. I can report no sense of shock. I can report no clear recollection of a personal cry for vengeance. After all, the people who truly did this were dead in the same action that killed so many others. I cannot report that I felt personally endangered. Under siege. No, none of that. Oh, we were wary, put a little on guard, but no more than that.

No, I was immediately more concerned with what this was going to be used to justify. How it was going to be used.

The only thing to surprise me later that day was that the missiles weren't flying by nightfall. I'd failed to reckon that with a GOP administration in place people expected a warring reaction, which bought them time to better consider their targets. Had there still been a Democratic administration in place a failure to blow something up thousands of miles away by nightfall on the East coast would have been touted as a sign of weakness. Different expectations and different rules. I realized that before the day was out, but I didn't get there ahead of events.

Most of the rest, though, fell as I'd expected and feared.

I understand that it was to combat that very marginalization that Tammy and others have attempted to keep things on a human scale by focusing on individual human tales. Whether or not it betrays a perhaps even sociopathic flaw in my character, I have to say that this approach does not call to me personally. As I looked over H's piece on the event - even just to the extent that we both recognize that the events played superbly to a game plan already largely in place for this administration - I believe I came closer to seeing the truth of my perspective as I compared my recollections with his:

There was not then nor is there now any sense of "I" in the "we."

I don't feel that "we" were attacked that day, and that "we" sufferered a direct loss. It was Something Terrible that that happened Out There. It happened on tv.

Oh, I know it happened, but so did the losses of Katrina. So did those gunned down or even hacked to death by machetes in civil wars in Africa.

To single those lost that day in that event - including those on each of the airplanes that were lost and those killed in the Pentagon - out from the many who died elsewhere that day, the week before and the week after... I cannot do it in any personally meaningful way.

::cough:: ::wheeze:: A news item I keep seeing but haven't pushed since waaaaay back when it was nothing but speculation is the toxic cloud New Yorkers were all but encouraged to breathe as "safe" back in the days following the collapse. (Thanks to Abbygal for a good, catch-all link.)