That Day

Today is *that* day. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check the date out. I feel some really strange sense of personal obligation to write something about that day, but I don't quite know why. Of course, facebook being facebook, it's full of statuses about that day, people posting up flags and remembrances and other stuff about never forgetting. Maybe this is my way to acknowledge that I remember without reducing it to a one or two line commentary. I've actually worked pretty hard not to read or ingest those statuses today, because I didn't want it to cloud what I've had brewing in my head about what I planned on writing.

I'm not going to get into where I was or what I was doing, other than to say I was at work and it was a gorgeous September day in Central Virginia, where the prospect of football games on crisp fall nights, the taste of cotton candy and funnel cakes from the local fair, and the impending leaf turning was hanging in the air. Quite frankly, everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing, if they had access to any type of media source. Internet, telephone, TV, radio, didn't matter. You knew what was going on. I remember thinking about a Twilight Zone episode I had seen when I was in middle or high school, where this woman finds some magical amulet where she can stop time, and in the course of the episode, she stops time as a nuclear bomb is arching towards America, thus stopping the bomb. And that was the end of the episode, one of those great TV episodes that leaves the viewer with more questions and what-ifs than they started with. We don't have enough TV like that anymore, but that's a whole other topic.

I also remember feeling this huge impending panic attack within myself, thinking, is this it? Is this the end of us? Is this what I read about in history for all of these years, what the sheer panic of a nuclear attack feels like? Holy fuck, I'm really close to Washington, D.C. (in a grand sense, like I'm closer than someone in Montana is closer). But then I calmed myself down and tried to recall that we have some awesome nuclear defenses, and besides, we weren't currently bickering with the Motherland and I don't think Iran had enough juice at the time to get one all the way over here. It was one of those incredibly rare moments in time for me as an American, because I suddenly felt like I knew what it felt like to live in Beirut, or some other faraway locale that had been terrorized forever and a day. I understood the shock, the fear, the questions.

I think that for my parent's generation, for my generation, maybe the generation behind me, this was our Pearl Harbor. This was our shot heard 'round the world. And unlike Pearl Harbor, and World War I, we watched this one on TV, live. We heard about missing airlines. We heard the call of the military to scramble and shoot down our planes. We wondered if we knew anyone flying that day, and wondered if someone we knew would be shot down by someone else we knew, or someone that we knew through someone else. We heard about people jumping from the towers, and some of us tried not to watch in horror. But we couldn't not watch. We wondered if we knew any of those people, those people who would be missing forever from our lives because several of our biggest engineering creations just ameliorated into themselves, two of them completely. We heard about the grounding of all commercial aircraft and that the borders were closed. We heard that Al Gore and so many others that we might have known were trying frantically trying not to get stuck in Canada or wherever else might have been. We took a little solace in knowing where that last plane ended up, and a little more solace in knowing that the American spirit brought it down in the end, doing it our way, goddammit. We wondered who did this? Where did this come from? We sat about, slumped in front of TVs, and radios, and computers and we knew instinctively, intuitively, that everything that we knew as Americans had just changed. Our world had tilted on it's axis, and it would never quite settle itself back into the exact same spot. As a country, as a culture and a people, we lost our naivete that day.

Nine years later, and where the hell are we? We've sent a lot of our men and women off to some far away sandy place, and I'm not talking about the beach, and we've watched as some of them have come back in coffins and some have come back not like they went. And for real, we can't undo that, and we can't make up for that. In my opinion, we ultimately should have had just one goal - find the motherfucker who orchestrated this and kill him, and maybe knock off a couple of his lieutenants as well. But it morphed into different goals. We invaded an old enemy and killed him, maybe just to make up for our inability of not being able to find the real and current enemy and kill him. We managed to completely destabilize a region that was actually somewhat stable before we arrived. We managed to shove democracy off on a part of the world that doesn't want democracy, that doesn't respect democracy. Democracy is not for everyone. If it were, the entire world would already be there. They've had hundreds of years or more to embrace this concept and haven't done it yet. We are not going to make it happen in x amount of time.

For the first five or so years afterwards, I actually got pretty depressed around this time of year, probably because I remembered without the media having to remind me, but well, that's the media. It's all about ratings. In retrospect, now that I've gotten a few more years under my belt, I just feel sad in some almost hopeless kind of way. I feel sad that we've resorted to strip-searching our grandmothers in airports. I feel sad that there is still a hole in the ground in New York and we've maybe lost the essence of it because we're so busy bickering over what to do with it. I feel sad for the children who will grow up without parents because they were either lost in the attacks or because they were lost overseas, some physically and some emotionally. Alternately, I feel angry that we can send an unmanned rover to Mars or some other planet but we can't find some motherfucker hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan. I feel angry that this might have started out as our Pearl Harbor, but it might just be ending up as yet another Vietnam, where we just rush the hell out of there from the rooftop of an embassy because something somewhere has gone terribly wrong.

So, yeah, to sum things up: I remember. We all do, because we can't not remember it and we can't not remember how things were before.