the inevitable 9/11 post
Sep. 11th, 2011 04:06 pmSo it's September 11 once again ... and as usual, news programs and documentaries about the events of 2001, now known as '9/11', abound. Some of the shows are the same - 'Phone Calls from the Towers', 'Flight 93', '9/11: State of Emergency', etc - but this is the ten-year anniversary, so we have a whole new selection. Interviews with former President George W. Bush and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; the 'kids of 9/11'; the terrible respiratory illnesses and cancers ravaging the first responders; you name it, there's a doco about it.
Inevitably, it's all over social media as well. The most common question being asked is: 'Where were you when you first heard about it?' This usually leads to a discussion about how people felt when they found out what had happened, or first saw the footage of United Airlines flight 175 ploughing into the South Tower.
In recent years, though, there's been something of a backlash. For some people, the sentiment is 'move the fuck on already'. For others, it comes in the form of a refusal to watch any media coverage of the event, especially memorials. And then there are people who angrily try to shut down the discussion. The reason they give for this is that, by focusing on where 'we' were at the time, we are trying to somehow make 9/11 about us - claim something to which we have no right at all.
I've been thinking about this for a few hours now.
I don't agree.
There are events that lodge in our memories, and never leave. Most of them are deeply personal - the death of a loved one, a car accident in which we were injured, divorce, birth, winning the lottery - but there are those to which we are only peripherally connected, yet which affect us for years afterwards. My grandmother used to tell me that she never forgot where she was when she heard World War II was finally over. My father remembered hearing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, my mother remembers every detail about where she was and what she was doing when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. My brother remembers hearing about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
And me? I remember where I was when I watched footage of the Berlin Wall coming down; when I first read about the Rwanda genocide; hearing about the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunami; watching with horror as another tsunami consumed the Japanese landscape - and I remember where I was when I first learned about 9/11.
None of those things was about me; but in another sense, every one of them was.
Because each changed the way I looked at the world, at my own situation, and at people in general. The shape of the world I'd known was 'changed, changed utterly'. Oh, I don't necessarily think I realised the full extent of that change at the time - that came later, in the cascade of consequences. But what I saw, what I learned on those days was undeniable. It was impossible that the world should be the same afterwards - that I should be the same.
I was lucky. My home was never destroyed. I never had to run for my life or hide from men bent on slaughtering me. I lost no family when the Towers came down. And I would never, for even a moment, try to claim that those events affected me more deeply and more profoundly than those who lived through them - or died as a result of them.
But that's not what this is about. It's not about whether 2000 people or 250,000 died; whether half a country was devastated or two building collapsed; or whether I was more affected than you. It's about incredible events, devastating, desperately hopeful, impossible events - and the fact that we're all human. We might say, 'there, but for the grace of Murphy', but when we see someone throw themselves out of a 95th storey window because it's that or die in a raging fire choking on thick, black smoke? We cry. We scream. We are shocked to our cores.
There's only one image from 9/11 I still can't watch without my eyes filling with tears - two people who, hand in hand, jumped from the North Tower. I don't know who they were. They may have been a couple, or maybe friends. They may have been co-workers. They may simply have been strangers who hung onto each other in the face of horror. All I know is that they were two people, and their deaths changed me.
There are things I understand now that I never did before the Wall fell. There are things I feel now because I saw the footage of a burned-out church piled with the blackened bodies of women and children in Rwanda. That doesn't mean these things were 'about' me - it means I can't pretend that what happens in the world can't touch me.
So I'll continue to remember that on September 11, 2001, I woke up in my bed in Croydon when the 7.00am alarm went off, and burrowed under the doona while listening to the Triple J news on the radio. I'll keep remembering that my first thought was that this had to be some kind of really tasteless hoax until the curiously flat, shell-shocked tone of the news announcer's voice made it through the last vestiges of sleep. I'll remember throwing back the doona and racing out to the loungeroom to turn on Sky News, just in time to see the South Tower falling. And I'll remember standing there in a nightshirt, holding onto the remote control, being unable to answer![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fire_wuff when he called out from the bedroom, and thinking that my kids were going to grow up in the middle of a war.
Because the moment I forget that? I think I'll be less than human.
Inevitably, it's all over social media as well. The most common question being asked is: 'Where were you when you first heard about it?' This usually leads to a discussion about how people felt when they found out what had happened, or first saw the footage of United Airlines flight 175 ploughing into the South Tower.
In recent years, though, there's been something of a backlash. For some people, the sentiment is 'move the fuck on already'. For others, it comes in the form of a refusal to watch any media coverage of the event, especially memorials. And then there are people who angrily try to shut down the discussion. The reason they give for this is that, by focusing on where 'we' were at the time, we are trying to somehow make 9/11 about us - claim something to which we have no right at all.
I've been thinking about this for a few hours now.
I don't agree.
There are events that lodge in our memories, and never leave. Most of them are deeply personal - the death of a loved one, a car accident in which we were injured, divorce, birth, winning the lottery - but there are those to which we are only peripherally connected, yet which affect us for years afterwards. My grandmother used to tell me that she never forgot where she was when she heard World War II was finally over. My father remembered hearing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, my mother remembers every detail about where she was and what she was doing when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. My brother remembers hearing about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
And me? I remember where I was when I watched footage of the Berlin Wall coming down; when I first read about the Rwanda genocide; hearing about the Boxing Day 2004 earthquake and tsunami; watching with horror as another tsunami consumed the Japanese landscape - and I remember where I was when I first learned about 9/11.
None of those things was about me; but in another sense, every one of them was.
Because each changed the way I looked at the world, at my own situation, and at people in general. The shape of the world I'd known was 'changed, changed utterly'. Oh, I don't necessarily think I realised the full extent of that change at the time - that came later, in the cascade of consequences. But what I saw, what I learned on those days was undeniable. It was impossible that the world should be the same afterwards - that I should be the same.
I was lucky. My home was never destroyed. I never had to run for my life or hide from men bent on slaughtering me. I lost no family when the Towers came down. And I would never, for even a moment, try to claim that those events affected me more deeply and more profoundly than those who lived through them - or died as a result of them.
But that's not what this is about. It's not about whether 2000 people or 250,000 died; whether half a country was devastated or two building collapsed; or whether I was more affected than you. It's about incredible events, devastating, desperately hopeful, impossible events - and the fact that we're all human. We might say, 'there, but for the grace of Murphy', but when we see someone throw themselves out of a 95th storey window because it's that or die in a raging fire choking on thick, black smoke? We cry. We scream. We are shocked to our cores.
There's only one image from 9/11 I still can't watch without my eyes filling with tears - two people who, hand in hand, jumped from the North Tower. I don't know who they were. They may have been a couple, or maybe friends. They may have been co-workers. They may simply have been strangers who hung onto each other in the face of horror. All I know is that they were two people, and their deaths changed me.
There are things I understand now that I never did before the Wall fell. There are things I feel now because I saw the footage of a burned-out church piled with the blackened bodies of women and children in Rwanda. That doesn't mean these things were 'about' me - it means I can't pretend that what happens in the world can't touch me.
So I'll continue to remember that on September 11, 2001, I woke up in my bed in Croydon when the 7.00am alarm went off, and burrowed under the doona while listening to the Triple J news on the radio. I'll keep remembering that my first thought was that this had to be some kind of really tasteless hoax until the curiously flat, shell-shocked tone of the news announcer's voice made it through the last vestiges of sleep. I'll remember throwing back the doona and racing out to the loungeroom to turn on Sky News, just in time to see the South Tower falling. And I'll remember standing there in a nightshirt, holding onto the remote control, being unable to answer
fire_wuff when he called out from the bedroom, and thinking that my kids were going to grow up in the middle of a war.Because the moment I forget that? I think I'll be less than human.
