It probably won’t surprise most of you that I am incapable of letting 9/11 go by without commenting. I am a New Yorker, it is my geographic DNA. Wherever I go, I take the City with me. I have written about that day a number of times and recounting that day one more time doesn’t feel like that compelling a story to me. Actually, that has been a challenge for me all along. Writing stories about my past experiences feels tired to me, even if many of you have never heard them before, I have.
Years ago, when I thought about doing this thing, I decided I needed to be sloppy and undisciplined and I think I have done a great job in that regard. Let’s get back to 9/11, if you don’t mind. What about that time has lessons for today? As one or two of you know may know, I have a podcast that covers the news each week. I am neurotically focused on the climate catastrophe and always start with news from this creeping debacle. Well, leave it to yours truly to look for linkage between these events.
9/11 was a sledge hammer blow to the heart of America. Every one of us old enough at the time, bled a deep, deep red sadness, shocked and traumatized by these seemingly senseless acts of violence and brutality. In that tragic moment, the human clock stopped, impossible to exhale. Recently, I have read statistics of that time and a couple of things caught my attention. Trust in government was at an all time and the desire for violence was a match. Today, trust has pretty much disappeared and violence has turned inward, color against color, God against God, the powerful and against the powerless.
On that singular day, we became the world. We were the victims of blind anger and opportunism, but if you think we were cloaked in a shroud of innocence, think again. It is very rare to find a confluence of grace and power, a time to share and not strike back. We had a rare opportunity, but we chose to get in the ring yet again, a costly and deadly catharsis.
Yes, the collapse of the Twin Towers and the collision at the Pentagon were like a hammer blow, nothing subtle about any of it. It’s nothing like something crept up on us, leaving us feeling at all confused. We were so goddamned angry, we didn’t care at all about who these specific perpetrators were, they were Arabs, period. In the process, our personal freedoms got sacrificed as well.
The climate disaster is like getting a thousand paper cuts and slowly bleeding to death, whereas 9/11 was an inescapable collision of concrete, steel and flames, spewing casualties and their blood connections everywhere.
I think 9/11 presented an extremely rare opportunity for this country and we not only let it go, we destroyed it. Whether in our private lives or as a society, it is so much easier to shut people out, rather than open ourselves up to the consequences of our actions, embracing them. Domination of others is flawed, just as domination of our environment is flawed. We could have looked to end the millennial legacy of violence and try to make a difference. The time is here yet again, the time to lead by example.
This whole thing was prompted by my reading a report on climate and how everything that occurs is related to everything else, that damn Zen interconnectedness thing again. We seem so blindly preoccupied with winning at all costs, the victims can be innocent Arabs or our coral reefs, it doesn’t matter. We have turned inward since 2001, shrinking into a terrible selfishness, a kind of soul pandemic, internationally contagious.
We lost one opportunity to bring the world together and we are now all faced with a deadly crisis of our own doing, one that effects every single person on this planet and those yet to be born. Every major weather event or report on the state of our planet or disappearing species always accompanies a dire prediction with a statement that we still have time to head off catastrophe. I often think about my time and how it has become more precious with age and how it has reoriented my value system, my priorities.
Twenty years after that last chance, we have another one and it is far more subtle. We can be students of history or its victim. Unless we come together as a global community, this world we take for granted will continue to unravel. I think about this a lot, wondering about the world my young grandson will inherit from all of us.
My podcast: Mind and the Motorcycle
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