(no subject)
To preface this, I'm going to say that this is me talking about my feelings about 9/11. You are more than welcome to skip this entry or stop reading at any time if anything is upsetting. Just know this is gut emotion and feeling, as well as opinion.
After going through my archives of this journal, I've discovered I...have never exactly spoken about this day. I've usually skipped it in the past or on the one occasion I did update on it, ignored it completely for silly reasons.
But largely, I try to forget September 11th. Not because I'm being unpatriotic; not by any means. At my core, I love my country and I love my state of New York, but while I can love, I can still feel extreme dislike and displeasure towards the things I love. I try to make September 11th like any other day and leave that day in the past. Unfortunately, I'm in the minority when it comes to that line of thought. This country has a habit of harping on such things with the same fervor and fanfare as the same day it happened. Where else can we watch the exact news casts the day and morning they happened on the anniversary of the event? The fact we call it an anniversary is a nice enough indicator that we, as a country, are not ready to move on. Every single year on this day, there's a memorial speech and people gather at the sites of the attacks, and all the news circuits bust out their archived footage and talk ad nauseum about it until the day is finally out. Hell, I remember, what was it...last year or the year before, that people bitched about Obama not going to NYC for the memorial. God forbid he stay in DC where a plane also struck the Pentagon. Or that his wife went to Pennsylvania to honor the United 93 people.
This year is special, though. I had a feeling it would be too, since it's now been a decade since the attacks. But all week, I've seen article after article after article about the attacks, what's changed, how we've changed as a country, etc, etc, etc. All week. And I read them, because despite my own desires to move on, I have trainwreck syndrome and want to see what's being said. And I've read some good articles. I think I'll link a bunch once I'm done. But I've also read...well.
Let's just say there's a reason why I try to forget this day.
For some reason, I get extremely overwhelmed with emotion at the thought and sight of photos or video of the attacks on the Towers. Like heart-in-mouth, punch-to-the-gut, sudden involuntary need to bawl one's eyes out. And I hate it. I can't tell you why I feel that way, either, but I can theorize.
Ten years ago, I wasn't in NYC. It was a Tuesday, and at the time of the attacks, I was in my Rhetoric class nice and early in the damn morning. We were all none-the-wiser of anything going on, as we were in Rochester, NY, a good six-seven hour drive away from NYC (depending on traffic). But then I got to my Freshman Seminar class. I don't remember what we were doing, and really, I try to put that class out of my mind as it was probably the dumbest and biggest waste of 3 credits of my life. The thing I do remember vividly is the talk about how someone hit the Pentagon with the World Trade Center with airplanes. That simple statement didn't carry any weight in my mind. In fact, I was in disbelief and brushed it off as a silly joke. I even had thoughts about how neat that'd be to play with as a story idea. I really didn't believe it'd happened.
Yet after class, there was...I don't know. Campus felt different. And for whatever reason, I walked into the student center and there, where they usually held little assemblies, gatherings, and the non-denominational church sessions was a huge projector screen just streaming the news and the images of the burning towers, though by this point, only one was still standing, and the United 93 plane was just being confirmed as having crashed in Pennsylvania. Things got very real for me very quickly, and still even then, I didn't quite understand the gravity of the situation, or I did and I just wasn't processing it because holy shit, those were two landmarks I've known all my life and they're just gone (and one I thought was cool had a bite taken out of it.) Back then, I don't think I could fathom what it'd be like to never see the towers again. By then, both towers had collapsed and tower 7 wouldn't collapse until later that evening.
Looking around at the other people in the room with me, I think it was hitting them with the same amount of realness. At least I wasn't alone in my shock. I stayed for a bit, but eventually I had to walk out. Might've been by the second-third time the news had cycled through their report on the situation. I think it was CNN. But regardless, I had to process this.
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. At one point, I tried calling home just so I could talk to my mom about it, but I couldn't get through. Not on my dinky cell phone I had back then, or anything. I'd heard of the Resident Life office offering for students to make phone calls and such since there was a big disruption of service going on. I went down with someone, I can't remember who (might've been my roommate, Nicole, or maybe it was Erin? I honestly don't remember) and eventually got through. You wouldn't think it would be hard to call to some place just an hour away in Syracuse, but it was. The phone call helped a bit, but that's when it hit me that I had no way of seeing if a couple of good friends going to school in NYC were all right. That didn't help. At all. And this was in the days before there was Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social networks that I would become aware of years later, so I couldn't just hop on one of them and message them--or see if they've updated their status.
In the days that followed, I'd keep watching the footage again and again, and with Bush's speeches and immediate declaration of war on terror, I was afraid there'd be a draft. So not only was I fearing for my friends in NYC, I was fearing that my best guy friends from high school would be drafted and sent off to be killed somewhere else in the world. For years I worried about that, and once my brother turned 18 a few years later, I feared he'd be as well. Eventually, I did learn that my friends were all right. Thank goodness. That summer, though, I'd learn that one of them had really been only a couple blocks away from the Towers when the planes hit. I don't remember if she told her parents or not.
I want to say...I think this day still affects me to such a degree because I wanted to believe it wasn't real, because I was in such denial about it up until that moment I saw footage of it. Seeing pictures of it now just brings those feelings back, and the footage...god. I can't get through more than a minute of it before feeling this utter need to bawl my eyes out. And I hate that feeling so much. I want it to go away so badly.
But like I said at the start, this is an event that we're not being allowed to forget. Hell, even one of the slogans is "May we never forget"! I saw this the other day, and that slogan? Is embossed onto a memorial located at Ground Zero depicting the New York skyline--with the two burning towers belching that acrid smoke up into space as it billows up and out, blotting out the sky. The fact that it's not the two towers preserved as they once were angers me. The removal of the towers from all media coming out that year and in the years following it angered me and still does that they felt the need to censor us like that.
I want to remember the towers as they were. I miss the sight of them in the still unfamiliar New York skyline that we have now. And I loved that skyline. I got to see it when I was eight and again just a couple years before the attacks. The towers, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in conjunction with the Statue of Liberty formed this iconic image and the towers were a focal point that I'd use to spot whether we were close to New York. (We'd stayed in Jersey and Pennsylvania on those trips, then drove into the city for those trips, so we approached the city from that way.)
I'm angry that we didn't simply rebuild the towers. Rebuild them as they once were (but with more environmentally sound materials) and show the world that hah, we will always rebuild what you tear down. Be defiant and brave in the face of those who hate the US. But we didn't. It took years to get something finally up and it still won't be done for a couple more years.
But I'm even angrier that this day has been become the political barb that it is. I can safely say that's another reason I hate September 11th. I get a knee-jerk reaction to it during any other time of the year when people use it to justify things done in the past ten years: the many wars, the loss of thousands of soldiers on foreign soil, this futile war on terror--a war on an idea that's nearly as futile as the war on drugs--Guantanamo Bay, the creation of a ton of additional agencies like Homeland Security and the TSA, the outrageous security restrictions instituted for air travel, and the Patriot Act. Just to name a few. If you even dare to raise an objection to any of these or anything else that came out of the fearful retaliations resulting from the attack, people go, "Oh, no you didn't! How dare you forget what happened when all those people died on 9/11?" or in short, they play the 9/11 card. It was and still is one of the big argument enders. Evoke it and other person looks like the unpatriotic asshole, even though he/she cares about the safety of the troops just as much, that we've stretched ourselves too thin trying to fight all these wars, that basic human rights have been denied to others on the basis of their religious beliefs, and that the American people themselves could have had their privacy invaded that easily if they were suspected of anything. That just rubbed me wrong that a tragedy could be used like that.
And above all, I'd rather think of the original 'slogan' of this day: "United We Stand" rather than be told that we will never forget because damn, that's just a given. As a country, we very much were united in our grief, shock, and anger, together, we continued on with life to show the terrorists and the rest of the world that we can get right back up and come back stronger. Ten years later, I don't feel that. Ten years later, we found and took out Osama Bin Laden, and so much has changed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lord, look at how things are changing in Libya and such! Things are changing for, hopefully, the better there, but I don't feel that here, in the 'United' States. I feel that we are at our most divided than we have been in a very, very long time. You don't need to go farther than the recent debt ceiling debacle to see evidence of that, or hell, switch on the TV and listen to the rhetoric of those who are supposedly representing us in the government at any level. There's so much ugliness and vitriol being spouted off daily, and so much misinformation being fed to people who just don't care to truly educate themselves about what's going on. We have government representatives who are ignorant to the plight of the general American people despite claims to the contrary and still work to make things even harder for the average person to get by.
This is not a country united. And on today, of all days, that stark contrast is glaringly obvious. Sure, we are still united by grief, but we don't work together as a people to help each other as nearly as much as we should. If we focused even a bit of that fervor and energy we expended on fighting on foreign soil to tackling issues right here at home, imagine what things could be like now.
Perhaps by the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of this day, things will have changed for the better for the United States and perhaps we'll truly feel united again. I can only hope because really, that's the one emotion associated with today that doesn't hurt for me to feel.
----------------
And to wrap this up, here are some links I've gathered, and I'm sure there are other good ones out there. Some are just good, and some do evoke those emotions all over again. I'll label anything triggery. But before I go, just...thanks for listening if you got this far.
After going through my archives of this journal, I've discovered I...have never exactly spoken about this day. I've usually skipped it in the past or on the one occasion I did update on it, ignored it completely for silly reasons.
But largely, I try to forget September 11th. Not because I'm being unpatriotic; not by any means. At my core, I love my country and I love my state of New York, but while I can love, I can still feel extreme dislike and displeasure towards the things I love. I try to make September 11th like any other day and leave that day in the past. Unfortunately, I'm in the minority when it comes to that line of thought. This country has a habit of harping on such things with the same fervor and fanfare as the same day it happened. Where else can we watch the exact news casts the day and morning they happened on the anniversary of the event? The fact we call it an anniversary is a nice enough indicator that we, as a country, are not ready to move on. Every single year on this day, there's a memorial speech and people gather at the sites of the attacks, and all the news circuits bust out their archived footage and talk ad nauseum about it until the day is finally out. Hell, I remember, what was it...last year or the year before, that people bitched about Obama not going to NYC for the memorial. God forbid he stay in DC where a plane also struck the Pentagon. Or that his wife went to Pennsylvania to honor the United 93 people.
This year is special, though. I had a feeling it would be too, since it's now been a decade since the attacks. But all week, I've seen article after article after article about the attacks, what's changed, how we've changed as a country, etc, etc, etc. All week. And I read them, because despite my own desires to move on, I have trainwreck syndrome and want to see what's being said. And I've read some good articles. I think I'll link a bunch once I'm done. But I've also read...well.
Let's just say there's a reason why I try to forget this day.
For some reason, I get extremely overwhelmed with emotion at the thought and sight of photos or video of the attacks on the Towers. Like heart-in-mouth, punch-to-the-gut, sudden involuntary need to bawl one's eyes out. And I hate it. I can't tell you why I feel that way, either, but I can theorize.
Ten years ago, I wasn't in NYC. It was a Tuesday, and at the time of the attacks, I was in my Rhetoric class nice and early in the damn morning. We were all none-the-wiser of anything going on, as we were in Rochester, NY, a good six-seven hour drive away from NYC (depending on traffic). But then I got to my Freshman Seminar class. I don't remember what we were doing, and really, I try to put that class out of my mind as it was probably the dumbest and biggest waste of 3 credits of my life. The thing I do remember vividly is the talk about how someone hit the Pentagon with the World Trade Center with airplanes. That simple statement didn't carry any weight in my mind. In fact, I was in disbelief and brushed it off as a silly joke. I even had thoughts about how neat that'd be to play with as a story idea. I really didn't believe it'd happened.
Yet after class, there was...I don't know. Campus felt different. And for whatever reason, I walked into the student center and there, where they usually held little assemblies, gatherings, and the non-denominational church sessions was a huge projector screen just streaming the news and the images of the burning towers, though by this point, only one was still standing, and the United 93 plane was just being confirmed as having crashed in Pennsylvania. Things got very real for me very quickly, and still even then, I didn't quite understand the gravity of the situation, or I did and I just wasn't processing it because holy shit, those were two landmarks I've known all my life and they're just gone (and one I thought was cool had a bite taken out of it.) Back then, I don't think I could fathom what it'd be like to never see the towers again. By then, both towers had collapsed and tower 7 wouldn't collapse until later that evening.
Looking around at the other people in the room with me, I think it was hitting them with the same amount of realness. At least I wasn't alone in my shock. I stayed for a bit, but eventually I had to walk out. Might've been by the second-third time the news had cycled through their report on the situation. I think it was CNN. But regardless, I had to process this.
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. At one point, I tried calling home just so I could talk to my mom about it, but I couldn't get through. Not on my dinky cell phone I had back then, or anything. I'd heard of the Resident Life office offering for students to make phone calls and such since there was a big disruption of service going on. I went down with someone, I can't remember who (might've been my roommate, Nicole, or maybe it was Erin? I honestly don't remember) and eventually got through. You wouldn't think it would be hard to call to some place just an hour away in Syracuse, but it was. The phone call helped a bit, but that's when it hit me that I had no way of seeing if a couple of good friends going to school in NYC were all right. That didn't help. At all. And this was in the days before there was Facebook, Twitter, and all the other social networks that I would become aware of years later, so I couldn't just hop on one of them and message them--or see if they've updated their status.
In the days that followed, I'd keep watching the footage again and again, and with Bush's speeches and immediate declaration of war on terror, I was afraid there'd be a draft. So not only was I fearing for my friends in NYC, I was fearing that my best guy friends from high school would be drafted and sent off to be killed somewhere else in the world. For years I worried about that, and once my brother turned 18 a few years later, I feared he'd be as well. Eventually, I did learn that my friends were all right. Thank goodness. That summer, though, I'd learn that one of them had really been only a couple blocks away from the Towers when the planes hit. I don't remember if she told her parents or not.
I want to say...I think this day still affects me to such a degree because I wanted to believe it wasn't real, because I was in such denial about it up until that moment I saw footage of it. Seeing pictures of it now just brings those feelings back, and the footage...god. I can't get through more than a minute of it before feeling this utter need to bawl my eyes out. And I hate that feeling so much. I want it to go away so badly.
But like I said at the start, this is an event that we're not being allowed to forget. Hell, even one of the slogans is "May we never forget"! I saw this the other day, and that slogan? Is embossed onto a memorial located at Ground Zero depicting the New York skyline--with the two burning towers belching that acrid smoke up into space as it billows up and out, blotting out the sky. The fact that it's not the two towers preserved as they once were angers me. The removal of the towers from all media coming out that year and in the years following it angered me and still does that they felt the need to censor us like that.
I want to remember the towers as they were. I miss the sight of them in the still unfamiliar New York skyline that we have now. And I loved that skyline. I got to see it when I was eight and again just a couple years before the attacks. The towers, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in conjunction with the Statue of Liberty formed this iconic image and the towers were a focal point that I'd use to spot whether we were close to New York. (We'd stayed in Jersey and Pennsylvania on those trips, then drove into the city for those trips, so we approached the city from that way.)
I'm angry that we didn't simply rebuild the towers. Rebuild them as they once were (but with more environmentally sound materials) and show the world that hah, we will always rebuild what you tear down. Be defiant and brave in the face of those who hate the US. But we didn't. It took years to get something finally up and it still won't be done for a couple more years.
But I'm even angrier that this day has been become the political barb that it is. I can safely say that's another reason I hate September 11th. I get a knee-jerk reaction to it during any other time of the year when people use it to justify things done in the past ten years: the many wars, the loss of thousands of soldiers on foreign soil, this futile war on terror--a war on an idea that's nearly as futile as the war on drugs--Guantanamo Bay, the creation of a ton of additional agencies like Homeland Security and the TSA, the outrageous security restrictions instituted for air travel, and the Patriot Act. Just to name a few. If you even dare to raise an objection to any of these or anything else that came out of the fearful retaliations resulting from the attack, people go, "Oh, no you didn't! How dare you forget what happened when all those people died on 9/11?" or in short, they play the 9/11 card. It was and still is one of the big argument enders. Evoke it and other person looks like the unpatriotic asshole, even though he/she cares about the safety of the troops just as much, that we've stretched ourselves too thin trying to fight all these wars, that basic human rights have been denied to others on the basis of their religious beliefs, and that the American people themselves could have had their privacy invaded that easily if they were suspected of anything. That just rubbed me wrong that a tragedy could be used like that.
And above all, I'd rather think of the original 'slogan' of this day: "United We Stand" rather than be told that we will never forget because damn, that's just a given. As a country, we very much were united in our grief, shock, and anger, together, we continued on with life to show the terrorists and the rest of the world that we can get right back up and come back stronger. Ten years later, I don't feel that. Ten years later, we found and took out Osama Bin Laden, and so much has changed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lord, look at how things are changing in Libya and such! Things are changing for, hopefully, the better there, but I don't feel that here, in the 'United' States. I feel that we are at our most divided than we have been in a very, very long time. You don't need to go farther than the recent debt ceiling debacle to see evidence of that, or hell, switch on the TV and listen to the rhetoric of those who are supposedly representing us in the government at any level. There's so much ugliness and vitriol being spouted off daily, and so much misinformation being fed to people who just don't care to truly educate themselves about what's going on. We have government representatives who are ignorant to the plight of the general American people despite claims to the contrary and still work to make things even harder for the average person to get by.
This is not a country united. And on today, of all days, that stark contrast is glaringly obvious. Sure, we are still united by grief, but we don't work together as a people to help each other as nearly as much as we should. If we focused even a bit of that fervor and energy we expended on fighting on foreign soil to tackling issues right here at home, imagine what things could be like now.
Perhaps by the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries of this day, things will have changed for the better for the United States and perhaps we'll truly feel united again. I can only hope because really, that's the one emotion associated with today that doesn't hurt for me to feel.
----------------
And to wrap this up, here are some links I've gathered, and I'm sure there are other good ones out there. Some are just good, and some do evoke those emotions all over again. I'll label anything triggery. But before I go, just...thanks for listening if you got this far.
- Internet archive with 3000 hours of footage from that day from around the world. (Link to the actual archive itself. It is very difficult to watch, even the video summary down on the front page. It's also very interesting to see what American press leaves out compared to what other world news organisations report.)
- Images from the attacks (Triggery)
- Newspaper headlines from that day (Triggery) There's a pic of Syracuse's Post-Standard in there, surprisingly.
- Effects of 9/11 on recovery and rescue workers
- Related to the above: A reporter's pocketful of dust and what it means.
- Why schools need to teach 9/11
- Another article discussing the need to educate about that day.
- Students with Bush when he learned of the attacks reflect on that day with him.
- Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Nahyan and the world united against terrorism
- Daughters of 9/11
- The footnotes of 9/11, aka the nearly 2K footnotes filled with personal accounts from the 9/11 Commission Report. (Possibly triggery)
- And because his reaction is still powerful, Jon Stewart's first day back since the attacks.