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I took my first real vacation this week since 9-11. My wife and I went to the same beach town we had visited that sad day all those years ago. It dawned on me as I arrived that I had never really been able to collect my thoughts of how I felt that day, that week. All of that came rushing back to me, though, as I crossed the bridge over the bay, turned onto the Coastal Highway, and started the slow crawl through traffic behind an SUV with a 'Proud to be an American' sticker on the back.
"That's one angry eagle." I told my wife. And it was certainly a pissed off eagle that was perched next to those proud words. My thoughts raced back in that instant to that brisk, sunny September morning that had been devoid of television, newspapers, and any of the other paraphernalia of my obsession as we sauntered down to the breakfast cafe, determined to unwind. As we entered, we noticed, without much interest, that there was a crowd around the television. "So what?" I said out loud, "Probably some sports crap."
We followed the waitress, sat down, and asked what all of the fuss was about. The people were now packed about 5 or 6 deep in front of the set, and I had to know. "A plane flew into the World Trade Center." she told us.
My, oh my. A plane into the nation's tallest building. I thought to myself, "Wild . . ." but, it wasn't earth-shattering enough to break up my sojourn into the blissful unawareness of vacationland. I ordered breakfast.
A group came in and sat at the table opposite ours. They were talking about the plane crash as an attack. I listened as closely as I could. They were saying something about the Mideast. I broke off from listening and offered up my own typically loud commentary, from my decidedly populist platform.
"It's not like we haven't been asking for it!" I said into that void between the conversations around us. "What do we expect?" I remember saying, oblivious to any political correctness, mindless of the consequences of open discourse. No one challenged me. I wouldn't have expected any open challenge that day. I had my time as a teenager, battling the greatest generation's jingoistic reflexes to militarism that had been shattered by the futile war in Vietnam.
But, those days were long past, and it was actually a bit more commonplace to hear expressions of dissent and challenges to the government's authority by more than just us hippies and rabble rousers. The conservatives had cornered the market on appeals against any 'nation-building' interventions of our military abroad. They had fought Clinton in Haiti and fought their own republican, Dole, on Bosnia. A shout out to no one about stupid meddling in the Middle East seemed positively harmless at the time. I cringe when I reflect on the un-thoughtfulness of my outburst.
We left the cafe, and, I swear, I was set on just heading to the beach. I spend my free time enmeshed in politics like an insane man. In 2001 I was recovering from the shock of Bush's ascendance to office. I needed to disconnect. I needed to pull myself away from the inane spectacle of our new Executive and his clown-dancing.
But, at that last moment, I decided to go back to the hotel room and turn on the television. It was there that I saw the second plane hit the second tower. I was crushed. We watched, listened, mourned, anguished. We crumbled to the floor in utter amazement and incredible grief as the towers improbably collapsed onto the rescuers, citizens, the streets below, and those inside.
We eventually pulled away from the carnage and destruction on the television, several hours later, and went to the boardwalk. To say that the crowd there was subdued would be an understatement. There was a silence among the vacationers that mirrored my own as my head buzzed with the horror and implications of the events. I could hear the snippets of conversations of shock and anxiety. I wondered about the possibility of other attacks. The Pentagon had had an explosion there that was attributed to a plane crash. I wondered, I guess unreasonably, about the possibility of an attack on the beach town. I imagined a cordon around the state. I felt under siege by a faceless enemy. I decided to look for a shirt with an American flag on it. I wanted to show my support for my country, my countryfolk.
I found two shirts with a small American flag on the front underneath of the words, Ocean City. I put one right on and felt an immediate affinity with folks who I would normally dismiss for their own nationalist displays of Americanism. I never would have considered actually wearing a flag in any prominent place before, except maybe on a rump patch in my freak years. But, I felt proud to wear mine as I continued my vacation. All of the flags in town were already sold. I was proud to have mine to connect with my fellow Americans around me.
When I returned home, I put a flag on my lamp post for everyone to feel. There weren't many houses without one. There weren't many cars without some sort of flag displayed on their window, bumper, or radio aerial.
The first thing I noticed on my return to the ocean town this week was that the flags had not been withdrawn. If anything, there were even more flags than there were in the town that sad week, years ago. America went through a two-year orgy of grief and tribute after 9-11 that culminated in a war against Taliban in Afghanistan and an invasion and occupation of Iraq. In these intervening years I've been fighting those deadly diversions in my own town, and I imagine the folks here defending those military mishaps as an extension of the anguish they experienced over the events of that fateful day.
The ocean town is a bit of a southern place, peppered with the southern conservatism that comes with a rural existence filled with farming, hunting, and Baptist religiosity. It was a sparse 15 years ago that I stopped fearing someone in that town spitting in the food I ordered and didn't have to fight to be seated in front of a restaurant away from the kitchen in the back. The discordant patterns of Americanism that were reflected there mirrored what I felt about my relationship with wider America. I was afraid of the racism that I felt lurked behind every cafe and storefront. I conjured my own demons and battled them more than any actual threat or affront.
The NAACP put fear into the merchants a few years back, and society has taken leaps. From Vietnam to the Iraq invasion, to the latest militarism, these small towns have borne the brunt of the sacrifice in the percentage of their residents who serve in these contrived wars. There is a stoic wall of patriotic dogma that prevents outward displays of dissent against the missions of their precious hometown troops. It would seem the height of arrogance to face a member of these military families and babble on about the injustice of the effects of the force their loved ones are charged with prosecuting. It would, in fact, be a shame to expect these small towns to show anything less than pride in the actions of their kinfolk abroad.
I tried to imagine what these folks felt today and I ended up just projecting my own fears and objections. Who knows what their reactions have been to the latest carnage and our nation's usual complicity? Who can say how they really feel about yet another conflict escalated to the point of threatening more war, and more calls for more sacrifice from their precious hometown soldiers abroad?
Yet, there is a difference in that town from my last visit on 9-11. There has been a marked shift in the attitudes of Americans from anger and pride at the attacks to guarded fear and defensiveness. It still feels like solidarity, though, to want to share displays of our flags. There is an understanding and an acknowledgment in the continued displays, of the shared consequences of the course our nation took in the wake of that tragedy in New York. In the sentiment behind those continued displays is the belief that our nation will live up to the ideals and values expressed in those clean lines and in the sparkling stars that represent the contribution of our 50 states. In the sentiment behind those continued displays is the hope of a nation for some rationality and balance to our responses to those who would do our nation, interests, and allies harm. There is the hope that their government will decide to stop fighting and bring their precious soldiers home.
I remember when the US used to know how to play the honest broker. Now, all they seem concerned with are their alliances. What we'll end up with after a decade of hardening positions is a harder world. The beauty of the strength of the US is in our ability to exercise restraint along with the threat of our awesome defenses. That was the moral authority we projected which convinced nations to resolve their own differences diplomatically. Our force was truly defensive, Now we have gone over to a paranoid type of militarism where everyone in opposition to the Bush regime's interests and ambitions is presented as a dangerous enemy rather than a less able adversary. He's taken our nation to the point where it seems he's afraid to back down, and it portrays weakness, not strength.
Others will do what they do, but we are supposed to be different, better. I don't think we accomplish that by flailing the force of our military around as if there were some victory over the world that can be had at the drop of a cluster bomb. I suspect, neither do the folks of this small town.
I'm back home now from my vacation, and the killings of innocents surrounding our own military muckraking and that of our allies has leaped tragically forward. My peace flag is the prominent one in front of my home these days, along with a small American flag. Not much has changed here either, except for my own transformation from anger to activism. The sentiment behind my continued displays is also hope for the future. Hope for our country. Hope that the rest of the world will finally decide to stop fighting and be able bring their own precious soldiers home.
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