I was planning to have this done by this morning. As you can see, things did not go as planned.
Part of it, most of it I suppose, is that while I have lots of thoughts about September 11, 2001 kicking around my brain, they don’t easily line up into any sort of easy narrative to be placed on the page. I have lots of observations and so very little structure. I was honestly tempted to just scrap the whole thing and just put up a piece about Superman maybe using an abbreviation for taking the Lord’s name in vain. But that felt like a cop out, like letting myself off the hook a bit too easy. No worries though, you’ll still be able to read how I feel about that whole Superman thing later in the week.
In any case, please bear in mind my remarkable lack of cohesion in putting this together and do your best to be kind if it all feels a bit…jumpy.
In reviewing the article I wrote on the 11th and the few days that followed (which was reprinted here on Friday) I was surprised by what I do and do not remember from those days. The details…they slip away. I had forgotten about the heartbreaking makeshift signs proclaiming a solidarity that proved ever so fleeting, even more fleeting than most of America probably realized. The bomb threats, the phone call from my professor…those I had blanked on as well. Hell, I cannot even remember watching the footage live. I know I did, I must have. We were locked down, we had nothing to do but stare glassy eyed at our TV sets or try our useless phones. But I don’t remember any of it.
The feeling of it I can recall instantly. The weird conflict of wanting to just hide running up against the desire to be out there doing something, doing anything, because, well, damn, those were my cities burning on the television.
I do remember that one plane and how such an innocuous sound could be so staggering, so frightening. I remember chasing down rumors about old friends and classmates who might have been at Ground Zero and finding, thankfully, none were real. And I remember talking to my dad and finding that people he knew and worked with were there and feeling profoundly unequipped to say anything about these people I never met, that my dad probably did not know very well, who when nonetheless found ourselves missing.
In DC, September 11 became a season that blanketed the city. In actuality, the Pentagon is across a sizable body of water from DC. For most residents, there was no real threat at all. What came after was when things really began for us. The bomb threats. The anthrax. The anthrax scares. I was evacuated from where I was interning twice for suspicious packages that, thankfully, came to nothing. People interning for Senators and Representatives had to find new office spaces when the packages they received turned out not to be so empty.
My then girlfriend, now wife, had a roommate who only left the room for class and internship and spent the rest of her time relentlessly writing about her day for what she claimed was going to be a book about living in DC during those days. I look back now and realize she was very likely wrestling with what my DSM-IV refers to as Acute Stress Disorder.
And yet…I loved DC. I loved my time at American. I met my wife and now, ten years later, we have a new baby daughter. I met people who I wish I kept in better touch with me because they were great. Fun, smart, energetic…we went to class everyday and internship everyday despite what had happened, what was happening. We walked past men with guns on our way to Starbucks, we attended basement raves near hotels that let people on to the roof to see the smoldering remains of the Pentagon. I wish September 11 never happened, but I can hardly imagine my life without it. And I imagine I am hardly the only one. For good or for ill, for ten years it has been an event that many, maybe most, of us wove tightly into our clothes, our skin, our souls.
So understand when I say this I mean no disrespect. I am so ready to be done with September 11. I think we should continue to honor and mourn the heroes. I think we should build monuments to their bravery and as an affront to the hateful barbarism of that day. But I am ready to put it in the past. I have no desire for this to become my generation’s Vietnam, not in terms of an intractable war but in terms of it being the cloud that hangs over every election for years. We did a lot right after September 11 and we did a lot wrong. I know this and while you may disagree about what falls on the right and wrong sides of the equation, I imagine most of you do too.
But I don’t want to fight those battles ad nauseum. We lost so much that day, I want to be done feeding that wound. We need to stop pretending that we get the difference between people who are Christian and do terrible things and Christians in general but that we cannot seem to make our minds do the same when it comes to Muslims. We need to stop doing things to make ourselves feel safer when they don’t actually make us safer at all. We need to learn the difference between casting off naiveté and embracing suspicious cynicism.
That’s my small prayer, I suppose. Or hope, if the idea of prayer makes you uncomfortable. That we can mourn without holding on. That we can remember without reliving. That we can stop thinking of the day in the context of horror and start remembering it as a day, a time, of heroes. Because “moving on” is not forgetting. Moving on is realizing that we have as much a responsibility to the living that survived as we do to the brave that did not.
When my daughter, two months tomorrow, asks about September 11, as I am sure she will, I will tell her what happened. We will talk about terrorism and loss and ramifications that echoed for years. Because it is important to be honest about these things. But I will also tell her about college hallways filled with classmates comforting one another despite not knowing each other even a month. I will tell her about giving blood. I will tell her about men and women who ran towards fire and ash and broken concrete. I will tell her about people who tried to do something, anything, because, well, damn, those were our cities.
I forgot we were both at AU that semester. I had American Politics as well, but if I recall we had different professors.
This is a great sentiment, and one I had never really thought of in those terms before, but one I whole-heartedly agree with. We need to learn from our mistakes, of course, and build on our successes. But we don’t need to re-litigate the past constantly, and it’s incredibly corrosive to the political culture when we do.
In DC, September 11 became a season that blanketed the city. In actuality, the Pentagon is across a sizable body of water from DC.
I felt that way when I was at AU that semester, but now that I live in the DC metro region, Arlington feels a lot more like an extension of SW DC — the Potomac as a dividing line is hardly as significant to me — and if you look at the Arlington County map line, it really does hold its shape as the SW quadrant of the DC square.
*~~~*~~*~~*
For varied reasons, my DC semester experience was the polar opposite of yours, as was my takeaway of the 9/11 experience. For me, DC was the third stop in a year spent studying away from home and USC, and by the time I arrived in DC, I had already lived 5 months in Jerusalem, spent a considerable amount of time traveling in the Middle East and Europe, made scores of new friends from all over the globe, and (sadly), had quite the depleted bank account. Here’s how all of that background shaped me going into 9/11 and that Washington semester in general.
There was nothing unusual to me about terrorism, terrorist threats, and the impact that has on daily activities (e.g. things like taking a bus to the mall or cinema, opening mail, seeing soldiers out and about with machine guns strapped around their shoulders). I had just spent 5 months living that in Israel, narrowly missed violent G8 protests in Genoa, and even experienced the Real IRA car bombing in London while I was studying in Cambridge. For me, while the specific events of 9/11 was surprising, alarming, and traumatic, they were not shocking. Indeed, my reaction when I heard the news over radio while at the doctor’s office that morning was, They’re here.
What to you and most Americans seemed the most unnatural of days from which you’d now like to move on, for me was an inevitable step in the unavoidable conflict we were in the middle of with radical Islamists — a conflict that, for America at that time, it was still possible to downplay and ignore was real. To you, 9/11 was some sort of odd aberration, and at some point, you just want closure and to end the political infighting that was sparked that day. To me, a 9/11-like wake-up call was going to happen — a matter of when, not if — and the dialogue that followed was both necessary, overdue, and bound to continue for as long as the threat is with us (I see no end in sight at the moment). If you feel like you lost some measure of innocence that day, well, you did, but it was as inevitable as the innocence you lose when you enter adolescence and discover your hormones and sexuality, and/or your conscious capacity to choose wrong over right. Now it’s time to be grown-ups and stop pretending that we can ever go back to that innocence.
I think your comparison to Vietnam is apt. Vietnam was inevitable; it was simply a matter of time before we fought a war that was experienced through the TV at home and which imperiled our society’s operating assumptions about how public support and political legitimacy for the war machine is sustained via our government institutions. We still feel the ramifications of that wrenching change today. Similarly, it took a 9/11 to upend our staid posture and thinking about who the enemies of our civilization are, and how we organize to defend ourselves from that threat. Before 9/11, a lot of us in the West talked about terrorism — it was, well, academic — and policymakers anticipated that changes were going to be necessary (see the Hart-Rudman report, for just one example). After 9/11, we had a reckoning and felt the sense of urgency we needed as a society to start to undergo that evolution. And yes, our institutions are still undergoing that evolution and that process will necessarily continue for decades hence.
As for that time period in DC, my experience was also tainted by personal circumstances. For starters, this was the first semester that USC operated their Washington Semester program through American University; prior to that, they ran their own program (the program is now run through George Washington University in Foggy Bottom). I was not excited about the change: it meant living in dorms instead of apartments; it meant a much larger program rather than a closer-knit group of people from the same school; it meant less autonomy and more structure and oversight. Coming off of studying abroad and backpacking in Europe, it was an especially difficult regression for me to accept.
Second, I was broke. Yes, I had budgeted for that semester, but frankly, I made choices that year that hampered my ability to truly soak in DC and enjoy the same experiences as my peers. When I had limited dollars and it came down to, do I go skydiving in Interlaken, or do I ensure I have sufficient cash to go out and party in DC, I made a conscious decision to maximize my backpacking experience and scrimp once back stateside. This meant I turned down a lot of opportunities to socialize and do stuff with people that I otherwise would not naturally have avoided doing.
Even more important than budget issues, 9/11 impacted my social life in another way: It crystalized my lack of interest in making new friends in DC. Two weeks into that semester, I was just settling in and getting into the groove, but after 9/11 happened, I realized something: I’m done making new friends. I’d already made a ton of them from across the globe (and many of those bonds still exist today), and by mid-September 2001, I realized, I just want to be with my old friends back home. I missed the Daily Trojan office, I missed the USC campus, I missed game days and rituals, I missed my campus posse. In fact, with what few recreational dollars and free weekends I had, I decided to use them to travel up the Eastern seaboard to see other friends and family that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see. I still managed three or four lasting relationships out of that semester, but frankly, while I wasn’t necessarily anti-social that semester, I just didn’t try to forge new connections; instead I fell into a small handful anyway. The end result was, while I observed the same behavior around me, I didn’t share that bond of experience with my peers like you did, Tim, and instead my approach to that semester was, well, more clinical — I observed and analyzed my peers more than I engaged with them and made friendships through shared experiences. In particular, I immersed myself in the issues du jour (i.e. terrorism and 9/11), and my internship at AEI working for Newt Gingrich gave me massive opportunity to do exactly that. Indeed, the quantity and quality of compelling speakers, and the opportunity for interaction with them, that I had through the AU program paled in comparison with what I got to experience at AEI; there’s going to the Americans for Tax Reform offices on K Street to have Grover Norquist speak to your class, and then there’s shaking hands with Benjamin Netanyahu and listening to Newt call up House members and discuss how they should strategize about particular policy agendas.
In summary, for me, 9/11 was less of a where-were-you-when-JFK-was-shot moment, and more of a life-altering event. The experiences and memories of that day, to me, are simply to serve as a reminder for why I support and work to achieve what I think needs to be done. Indeed, I cannot imagine where I would be *right now* and what I would be doing if 9/11 or something similar hadn’t yet occurred. It would be like Brendan and Becky trying to imagine what their lives would be like today if he had gone to UConn, or Becky hadn’t done the Resident Honors Program at USC. Yearnings for moving past bitter political disagreements aside, I simply don’t know how one can “be done” with and “move on” from something that is ultimately integral to one’s current identity and circumstances.
*Sigh*. There should have been a [ / i ] tag after “They’re here.”
Re: moving on and being done.
I can understand and appreciate the standpoint and yes, it is a part of my DNA forever. But we move on from events integral to our development all the time, be it relationships (either ended or redefined), the loss of loved ones, school, employment, and so on. September 11 was a huge, shocking event, but for the majority of us we did not directly lose anyone in the attacks. Thus, up against the death of a close friend or family member it arguably would be less integral to one’s life and development. So, again, while I respect your perspective, I would suggest we move on everyday from life altering moments and events.
As for your experience in DC, sorry it was overall disappointing. I can certainly relate to the being broke part. I worked on AU’s campus all semester and it was still a struggle to do all I wanted to do. Thankfully DC has a number of free museums and such that let me have fun on the cheap. As for the friend thing, I cannot imagine ever deciding to be done making friends and I bet that would make things significantly less fun. In my case in particular, I’d still be a single guy had I gone that route. But, it sounds like there were at least some benefits to it so I am glad the internship at least delivered.
I don’t think it’d be correct to say my DC experience was “disappointing”. Was USC’s Washington Semester program less satisfactory overall because it was set up through AU instead of what had been done in years prior? That’d probably be my vote, sure. But I did get quite a lot out of it. I still keep regular contact with my AU professor, as a matter of fact (and yes, she still teaches the American Politics section of their Washington Semester program), and am one of the only ones to do so from her earliest classes (she began teaching there in 2000, I believe). And like you, I met a girl there that, while we didn’t date at the time, I ended up dating a year later in Los Angeles and was someone who I thought I would end up marrying (except that’s not what happened). I socialized quite a bit with classmates and fellow interns, I did plenty of fun things, but at the end of the day, I was ready to go home and replant my roots and plug back in to my comfortable old connections — connections that, because of the emotional impact of 9/11, I began to miss terribly, having been gone from them for so long already by the time I got to DC.
My point was simply to contrast our relative perspectives, given that we were both in the same place at the same time. For you and the vast majority of Washington Semester participants, this was your “jailbreak” semester — your chance to explore and do something outside the confines of your four-year university setting, make new friends, experience a new university / city setting. I had already had that experience by studying abroad and had maximized it quite well, so I had somewhat of a “been there, done that” attitude going into that fall. That didn’t make it disappointing, it just made my experience different from most of those around me. It’s probably not unlike the difference you might notice in college student attitudes between the standard freshmen straight out of high school, and the mid-twenties adult who enrolled after having worked first, or started a family, or just came out of the military and is using his GI bill benefits.
As for moving on, I will just have to say we have different conceptions of what it means to “move on… from life altering moments and events”. To me, Oklahoma City was a shocking event that caused us to mourn, learn a few minor lessons, and move on. But 9/11, IMO that changed our very DNA, and it’s not about closing the book on a period or event so much as it is about understanding how we’ve been permanently altered and shaped by it — and continue to be shaped. I get the impression that, for you, 9/11 was simply a much worse version of Oklahoma City, and that’s simply not true for me whatsoever.
We can’t forget 9/11 because it isn’t over yet.