Nine years ago I was working on a movie with a friend. We were doing our best to keep it from collapsing due to lack of faith from the lead actor, and we’d just discovered that we needed to get a new camera. It was a pretty big deal in my life.
I was in a new relationship with a cute girl that *I* pursued, for once in my life, and still dealing with the (nuclear) fallout of the old relationship.
Ben and I fancied ourselves deeply philosophical, so we would go out to coffee and dissect every little thing in our lives. The night of September 10th, we got into his car and started driving East. We didn’t know where we were going – in fact, we chose random directions at nearly every intersection, just to see where it would lead us.
With the windows down, my long hair would flap around me, so (in a show of brotherly solidarity for his love for Americana, I suppose) I picked up an American flag bandanna very similar to Ben’s own, and we drove off into the night, blasting music and with nowhere we had to be.
Many hours later, after exploring the docks on the east side of Michigan, attempting time-lapse photography using a camera without film(!), we found ourselves on a dirt road. Out of nowhere, a guard station and fence pop out of the darkness. We were at Selfridge Air Force Base, and the guard was beckoning us forward! We backed away, turned around, and started home, wondering what the guard must have thought about us.
It was so late at this point that we were running into morning traffic. When Ben dropped me off at home, I was so tired I missed the doorknob twice. I collapsed into bed after seeing on my homepage that one plane had struck the WTC. Odd, but private plane suicides have happened in the past, and there was no information, just the headline.
I crawled into bed, and it was a very short time later that Ben’s phone call woke me with the news that an actual big plane had struck the WTC, and that I needed to get myself to a TV. He himself was woken up by a friend shouting, “We’re under attack, get up!”
I was upstairs watching what little coverage there was when the second plane hits. Soon, the world would erupt, as every single thing in the United States would grind to a halt. I literally forgot I hadn’t slept at all.
A few hours into this, I realized I needed company so Ben and I met at a bar and grill whose TVs were tuned to the news, and we sat there, mostly in silence, for hours.
We talked about the implications, we talked about our fears, we talked about how this would change everything. We knew it was a fundamental shift in how americans saw the world that happened that day, and we wondered (very soberly) how that would play out.
A day later, during a coffeehouse candlelight vigil, I suggested we go to New York city.
It sounded crazy, in all that mess and horror, but I convinced them that this was an important moment in our lives that shouldn’t be understood through a television lens. We had some hopes of helping somehow, but mostly I wanted to grasp this with my own senses so it didn’t seem like a Die Hard movie gone sour.
It was a sobering experience, to stand at the barricade and lift your binoculars to see, through the eternal smoke, wreckage. To know that directly in front of you, thousands of people had died, and most of them were still there, under the rubble.
After we spent as much time as we could in downtown NY, we crashed at a campground an hour North. We’d experienced kinship with strangers, and the awkwardness of wanting to help but not knowing where to go or what to do.
We had an inkling of how the country would come together, but we didn’t know how short it would last. Less than a week after going to NYC, we found out we had to go out there again in order to buy a video camera, and dark-haired Ben put the fear of a bomb, accidentally, into the hearts of staff at a hotel in Philly. Unshaved Ben + brand new credit card + duffel bag = terrorist, donchaknow. I’ll never forget them looking AT HIS LICENSE and saying warily, “… Willim Karl Benjeem?”
We had an idea that security would become a priority, but we never imagined how both the U.S. and Britain would come to monitor their own people in the name of terror prevention.
We knew people would give up some rights for the sake of a perception of safety, but we didn’t know how deep those sacrifices would go.
And we knew that it would lead us into war, but we had no idea how far-reaching that war would be, nor for how long in our lives that war would last.
That very first week, we saw the roots of outright racism dig in deep as people beat up and even killed people they thought might be muslim, and people destroyed businesses in hysteria. We didn’t know how it would grow and alter until it became just another slurred word – an excuse to treat another human being without the same respect we demand.
Nine years later, we have not moved on. We have not grown past the acts of 19 men who plotted to destroy our society. I don’t feel safer.
Instead, I feel like people in our society use this experience, this horrible event in our lives, to manipulate each other for their own goals. They hold it up high and use it to justify anything they want. And it disgusts me. It disgusts me as much as hearing people fight over who gets to “own” it – like whose feelings about the disaster are more valid, which is just another flavor of “who is more American” or who is more patriotic.
I want to believe in, faith in each other, charity, integrity, and the desire from all of us to do unto others as we would have done unto us. And then I hear the thinly veiled racism that comes with the community center in New York, and I wonder if we will ever have that. We will always find an excuse to say that someone else doesn’t deserve the same liberties that we want for ourselves.
I won’t let that happen to me. I refuse to allow some assholes in a plane (or assholes using other assholes in a plane) decide what I should think is right and wrong.
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I’ve participated in the conversation about bullying in a few places on ze internet – I think it’s an important discussion we need to have and keep having. The point of this discussion is to inspire action. If someone does not speak up, stand up, and help when needed, they are perpetuating the problem.