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This Thursday will mark the seventh anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Like any American who had the facility of memory, I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news. Living on the West coast, my first news of it happening was when my clock radio alarm went off and instead of the normal moronic morning show I had gotten used to, I got some very sombre reporting of a plane having crashed into the World Trade Center. My mind immediately went to the crash of a B-25 bomber into the Empire State Building in the early 1940’s, and I assumed it was an accident, until the reports of the second plane hitting the second tower came in, at that point it seemed brutally clear that this was an act of terrorism. My mother, who was just waking up too, came out and asked if I had heard the news. We went downstairs and turned on CNN, to be greeted by the horrible sight of a gaping hole in each of the towers, with smoke pouring out of them. My mother began to bawl. I don’t think I have ever seen her so shocked, saddened and afraid in my whole life.
I got ready for work in a daze and as I drove out to the job site where I worked as a carpenter’s apprentice, there was the strongest sense of the surreal. It was a uniquely beautiful day in the San Bernardino Mountains, the sun was rising and painting the sky a lovely pale blue. It seemed truly perverse to me that on such a lovely day thousands of people were currently locked in a struggle against death on the other side of my country.
Getting into work, the radio was filled with the panicked rumors of a nation under attack. Beyond the all too true reports of an attack on the Pentagon, there were the reports filtering in about car bombs at the Capitol, the White House and the State Department. There was the chilling image of thousands fleeing Washington DC in the fears of further attacks. It conjured scenes reminiscent of the French government fleeing Paris in May of 1940, with the Nazi war machine nipping at their heels. And then came the unthinkable news: The first tower fell, followed shortly by it’s twin. Not having a television nearby, I had no conception of the true nature of the devastation until I got home that evening. It was then that I realized, It wasn’t that part of the building had collapsed, the towers were completely gone.
Like most of my countrymen I went a little crazy in the days that followed. As horror heaped upon horror, I felt like screaming, raging a wordless rant of fear, rage and grief until I could make no more noise. Part of me wanted nothing more than revenge. I fear that had President Bush cried for nuclear war in those first days, few would have opposed him, including (and it shames me to say it) myself. It took time, greving and a fair amount of proof that our government was less than honest or competent to bring many of us out of this terror-induced stupor. Yet even today, certain things bring me back, and just for a moment I’m 19 again, looking into the rubble of the world I grew up in.
This week, for the seventh time, our minds will be called up to remembrance of that awful day. (Indeed, the film at the RNC last week seems to be the start of these sombre festivities.) We will remember the noble sacrifices of first responders who willingly gave their lives to rescue those trapped in the towers. We will recall the brave passengers of United flight 93, who fearlessly made the last act of defiance against a cunning foe, and spared us further tragedy on an already tragic day. And we will be reminded once again that life is neither safe nor certain in the dangerous geopolitical circumstances in which we live.
Yet lest we lose sight of things, “Patriot Day” as it is so called is no day of commemoration. Much like Pearl Harbor Day it is a reminder of the price of failure, and 9/11 was a failure writ large. That it was a failure of security goes beyond question. That it was a failure of intelligence has been the subject of innumerable reports, books and conspiracy theories during the intervening years. But beyond all that it was a failure of leadership, both our ability to choose leaders, and our chosen leaders to respond to the threats that surround us. As President Bush sat insensate in that classroom in Florida a thousand decisions essential to the defense of our nation were being made, while the man we had supposedly elected, the man who would later pride himself as “the decider” decided almost nothing on that most crucial of all days.
September 11th was a signal to our nation that things would no longer continue as they had in years past, that we could no longer consider ourselves immune from the consequences of our foreign and economic policies. That like all great powers before us, we too would not be able to escape the world we had helped to make. Seven years after the fact, in the waning hours of the Bush Administration, as we come together once again to pick a leader, the question arises, have we yet learned the brutal lessons of that terrible Tuesday morning? If we have, we will seek leadership that will both inspire the competence and engender the goodwill necessary to protect our nation. If not, then the awful edict of Santayana may yet hold true:
“Those who ignore the lessons of History are doomed to repeat them.”
May we not ignore those lessons, so that we may have no more days of remembrance to add to the terrible list of December 7th and September 11th.
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