(September 11, 2016)
This is going to be a long-winded September 11th Fifteenth Anniversary essay, edited from Twitter posts, which I'll try and punctuate with appropriate music, but it's very personal and stream-of-consciousness so adjust expectations accordingly.
This is going to be a long-winded September 11th Fifteenth Anniversary essay, edited from Twitter posts, which I'll try and punctuate with appropriate music, but it's very personal and stream-of-consciousness so adjust expectations accordingly.
This afternoon I was listening to Alison Kraus' "Daylight" as my own personal September 11th remembrance ceremony- what with Trump, Islamophobia, gun massacres and ever increasing racial tension, it seems like this year is most depressing yet.
So many people, the very young to the elderly, most in the late thirties or early forties, were snatched so cruelly and suddenly from life and all that came from it was torture and tragedy...it's easy to despair. Has this country accomplished anything in any of the anti-terror actions since 9/11 besides increase the misery and suffering of others? Does justice really require such catastrophically high levels of dead collateral damage? Will anything ease the sorrow of those who lost loved ones, dying in such pain and agony?
So many people, the very young to the elderly, most in the late thirties or early forties, were snatched so cruelly and suddenly from life and all that came from it was torture and tragedy...it's easy to despair. Has this country accomplished anything in any of the anti-terror actions since 9/11 besides increase the misery and suffering of others? Does justice really require such catastrophically high levels of dead collateral damage? Will anything ease the sorrow of those who lost loved ones, dying in such pain and agony?
Cruelty/murder only begets more of same, pain cannot be erased by inflicting it on others. Death is so resolutely final, the fear of which seems to be the animating force behind religion itself, which in turn prompted the 9/11 hijackers themselves...death is a horrifying cycle, and perhaps the enduring legacy of what happened on September 11th, 2001 is that it reminds us how close it can be and to live what life we have accordingly.
Fifteen years ago today I was a horny teenage virgin, still smarting over being shot down by a girl I was in love with in Salzburg, on a rainy day right in front of a statue of Mozart. In retrospect it was pretty funny. As a teenager, you (or at least I) cling obsessively to your emotional/romantic wounds, and that summer after the Epic Austrian Shoot-Down both the father of one of my best friends and my grandmother died. My friend's dad died while we were camping in Canada, they sent a pontoon plane to our camp to tell him. I was sleeping in a tent and only woke up when the plane flew away with my friend, headed back to Atikokan. The rest of us paddled back over a day and a half, going back to Joliet for the funeral. I waited in my folks' car for some reason before the funeral started, Elton John singing "Levon" on the radio, "Levon" of all things, God.
Every time I hear that song I think back to that summer and try to remember what life was like before September 11, what it must've been...for those who died. My grandmother had a stroke on the 4th of July and died about two weeks later. We took a family vacation and came back in early August, 2001. I saw a newspaper at Midway (or was it O'Hare?) with a headline about Bush and thinking "Ha, I totally forgot that guy is President, Jesus."
I was actually excited about junior year starting, because I was desperate to have a girlfriend, I was really raring to go, dating-scene wise, I don't even know who I had the biggest crush on, though in retrospect it was probably Amber Sylvester, for which no one who attended Minooka Community High School could blame me. I spent the remainder of summer hanging out with Ben & Matt at a Ranch Pharmacy in Channahon (which for some reason always had The Platters singing "Red Sails in the Sunset" on the P.A.) sneaking into JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK by buying tickets for PEARL HARBOR, harassing the junior high kids in Ben's neighborhood and in general driving around aimlessly looking for God knows what.
It was backstage at fall play rehearsals, late August, maybe early September, that I first laid eyes on this cute tall, long haired shy girl: I found out her name and struck up a conversation- married her 7 years later, divorced 3.5 years after that, having spent a decade together. To this day one of my most traumatic memories outside of September 11th is the day I had to move all my stuff out of what had been our house before she'd be served with the divorce papers...my nightmares still go back to that moment.
The point of this is that everyone murdered that day, I imagine, was having similar banal, everyday experiences and that death ripped these people, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, siblings, friends, lovers away like THAT. The gift of living a normal boring life of routine has to be recognized as just that, a gift I've served up far too much self-pity and self-deprecation for me to be taken seriously sometimes. So perhaps remembering days of horror, carnage and death is a form of needed perspective.
The voice of September 11th is deep and quiet, but it echoes forever for those who remember, and it says a few sentences that will reverberate through our lifetime. "You don't really know suffering. You don't know despair you don't know true death, the true end. You feel pity for yourself without reason. All is trivia without suffering. All is empty charity without love. All is hate without humility."
Memories of lost loved ones are haunting, hurtful, unbearable, but we must hang on to them, they can make us better people Those memories can bring out light, compassion and love...maybe that's the big takeaway from today, 15 years later. Act with empathy always Otherwise, we are all lost. Every goddamn one of us.