|
I remember September 11, 2001.
My son was stalling for the inevitable: clothes, shoes, school. Sixth grade ennui.
My sister called and told me to turn on the television. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. My first thought: who could do that? She knew it wasn't a "really bad pilot" even though she's from Texas.
As I watched, another plane flew into another tower. Did I see it happen? Or do I now think I saw it happen, after viewing that same image over and over on that day...and now on so many days of two more years.
The two towers were burning. The first tower seemed to have a gash which curved, like a cynical smile, across floors, lives, across decades.
My son was a baby when I heard the attack on Iraq had begun a decade before. I stayed up all night and watched the green night vision flash of bombs light up minarets and wondered if we would destroy ourselves and the rest of the world, along with Baghdad. This year it's deja war voodoo all over again.
I was a second-grader in Miss Eileen Fann's class when she rolled the television away from the back wall and turned it on. She started to cry as the black and white images flickered across the screen. I was filled with wonder that my teacher could cry. She was crying because our President had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. At 12:29p.m., I later learned, Nellie Connally quipped to President Kennedy, "You sure can't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President."
In another minute he was dead.
Whenever this country faces a horrific event, I remember that first moment, for me, in Miss Eileen Fann's class.
Unlike Miss Eileen Fann, I didn't cry on September 11, 2001. I am more jaded than she was. I am a child of John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and Medgar Evans. I wasn't allowed to date when four dead were in Ohio and soldiers were cutting us down. They weren't cutting me down. But they were. I got an education at Kent State before I could drive.
And then the second tower fell. It fell. The tower fell, and everyone in that tower was not going to come down the stairwells to safety. Was it inevitable that the twin towers would be destroyed together, as they were built? Did I wait for the second tower to fall?
I never once thought of George Bush as those towers were falling.
I thought of the waiters and chefs and firefighters and secretaries and couriers and brokers and managers. Who was holding hands as they jumped? How many merged with the air and the fluttering papers and ashes and fire in the terrible, terrible knowledge of death?
September 11 was about the people in my country who, like people around the world, become the casualties of arrogance and hatred.
I knew Bush would use them, like cannon fodder, to make himself powerful in an unholy communion of war lords drunk on oil.
|