Five Long Years Ago: 9/11

This morning a dear old friend, replying to an e-mail I sent about our son in Iraq, wrote "Your e-mail was just what I needed on this solemn day--a reminder of how so many of our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers are spending it."

My reply to him was this:

Sorry to be the Little Mary Fucking Sunshine in your day....

I am embarrassed to admit it, but I don't think I could feel more removed from 9/11 than I do at this moment. It seems like something that happened a long time ago to other people, and was a tragedy that was hijacked in order to obtain carte blanche to spread more misery and suffering around the world for reasons that have little or nothing to do with 9/11. What happened on 9/11 was terrible, and what followed -in the name of 9/11- was impure and unjust. Three thousand innocents died that day. Many, many more around the world have died since "in their name," and yet the world didn't stop.

You know my wife lost a co-worker on AA flight 11, and I'd even met the guy -so that was eerie. And both of my cousins, Ann and Terry, were working right at or very near Ground Zero, one in WTC 2, when the chaos began. Ann and her husband spent all day and most of the evening walking home from downtown Manhattan to their house in Harrison, and when sick-with-worry neighbors saw them coming up the street in the dark, they all came out of their homes and cheered, lights went on all over, and their children were safe with another neighbor. So it isnt like I have no connections, but I imagine that I'm either just a callous bastard or that events like that tend to have a bigger impact on, and linger longer with folks more immediately involved --like my cousins, both former Army officers and still ardent supporters of the current administration. We dont speak much, except in very superficial, polite ways on rare occasions, which is sad. But they have a worldview that doesnt permit mine or that of my family, and that worldview -growing up in Springfield, VA, strict Catholics with a father who worked (and after 9/11 was called back to work) in Top-Secret R&D for the defense industry...something with submarines and communications in general; probably he works on cellular/transmitted intercepts or something now- was reinforced by the events of 9/11, and everything that ensued justifies what to me appears as their hyper-nationalism (rather than patriotism), their attitude of the ends justifying any means, rah-rah Go Gitmo! and so on.

I'll never forget 9/11, the strangeness of it, the sense of unreality and numbness as events unfolded...etc.

But what I think I'll most remember until the end of my days, is how this country -and the world- changed as a result of how that day's tragedy was politicized, manipulated, and so on; how this administration played a major role in making the world less safe, angering and killing and maiming and wounding like a drunken, blinded bully of gigantic proportions, whiskey fists flying. Without sense. Immorally. I'll remember how as the 21st century dawned, proof was again offered -by this great country, this grand experiment called America- that humanity has learned little about some things after so many tens of thousands of years, and apparently isn't especially interested in learning. We took a world united and divided it, tarnished it, our nation, and appear bent on perpetual conflict and keeping people terrified and terrorized. And that made and makes me sad.

Frankly, there's enough tragedy and worry right at home if one wants to dwell on it, from lung cancer to a son in Iraq and everything in between, but rather than dwelling on those things too much, I see that September 11, 2006 is a beautiful, sunny day with blue skies. True, they aren't the same "friendly" skies they were six years and a day ago, and maybe I'm a little more tentative when I look into the blue, a little edgier, but I also have a beautiful younger son and a daughter to watch and look after, and the work folks are in the house today putting in hardwood flooring, and I have a to-do list a mile long and so much more... So, I feel blessed, very grateful, very fortunate. The Twin Towers, the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania, I'm sorry to say, have a very minute place in my busy day, though not an unimportant place: The tragedy was so immense that I may simply have tuned it out or toned it way down on a deep psychological level...I am sorry for everyone who suffered, who still suffers, and can only offer my prayers and good wishes for what those may be worth. And I realize that all the sunshine and children and so on are all part of a world quite different than the one we grew up in, and to some extent my own sense of excitement and wonder has been jaded and become "wonder" as in "I wonder how the fuck all that happened and how ensuing events were allowed and continue to be allowed to happen? And will anything like 9/11 happen again?"... Yes, this blessed life I have today -and hopefully for many more decades- will be in a vastly-changed world, a bleeding world in need of a lot of healing, a world of this pitted against that, and us versus them, and a whole adversarial and suspicious mentality pervading so many things.

However, I'm confident I can navigate this new age of melting glaciers and bugaboos imagined by Homeland Security (as well as real threats) without becoming too hopeless, too lost. And you're living it -traveling to Peru, Hawaii back-and-forth; continuing in school and driving onward like a man without a moment to lose, and that's as it should be. Even if we're a little more wary.

And so we sign our children up for soccer and gymnastics and cheer, and we go to recitals and parent-teacher conferences. And we go on picnics, to barbecues, to visit grandparents, to the green grass in the park, and we splash in the pool.

I chat with my wife, mow the lawn, try to get the bills paid. Nothing extraordinary. It is certainly much more than the victims of 9/11 -those who were killed that day and who have been killed since- have. So, I have this day, and while it is undeniably colored by the aftermath of 9/11, the tragedy of events five years old curves away from my mind, my family, my home, like the ribbon of road away from our driveway, down the court, around the corner, and is gone.

But always there.

Still, the sound of children laughing outside mingles with birdsong.