The Stuff We're Supposed to Remember

We all know what happened.

Post 9/11 NYC Skyline with Tribute in Light.

We know about the cloudless sky on a beautiful, warm summer morning. The Yankees had a game that day, and so did the Mets, I think. If we’re old enough, we’re prompted to remember everything we were doing leading up to 8:46, Eastern Daylight Time, on an otherwise random Tuesday.

You know, before our way of life was forever altered. Cue the dramatic music.

This is the narrative we’ve been force-fed for 19 years now. It’s become as much a part of the fabric and folklore of American History and Culture as George Washington’s cherry tree, Martin Luther King’s dream, and, well, slavery. As the years accumulate, more and more kids move through high school and young adulthood, never having lived in a time before the towers fell, knowing instead of the fear that came from that. There’s not a single child in the public K-12 school system that was born before September 11, 2001. Given the world we live in now, and when you consider that there is a direct thru-line from that day to where we are right now, it’s time we talked about what life was like, not only before, but in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

First and foremost: Muslims weren’t the bogeyman before 9/11. Yeah. Read that again. We didn’t regard Islam as this evil religion that made specific hatred of Americans its singular focus. Most Americans could not have cared less. Terrorism was a thing, but it was a European thing, even after the 1994 World Trade Center bombing. We identified the terrorist groups as the radical that they were, but we didn’t immediately declare 3 billion people the enemy of all things American. Those men in 1994 didn’t represent Islam any more than Timothy McVeigh, or Jim Jones represented Christianity. The shift in tone after 9/11 is shameful. We declared war on a religion where less than half a percent of its practitioners felt we were an enemy. Muslims, and anyone who looked like they might be Muslims, were lumped together as the “them” of the situation and were suffered abuses for it that we should be ashamed of.

Also, something to remember: before Rudy Giuliani was “America’s Mayor,” or the personal lawyer for the current occupant of the Oval Office, he was largely reviled in New York as a Napoleonic douchebag. He antagonized communities of color for eight years and put forth many of the policies that make my hometown currently barely affordable for the people that live there. The consensus in the city at the time stated that the only thing he did right during 9/11 was that he didn’t die.

Missing posters in NYC after 9/11

But here’s the other thing we need to remember. In the aftermath of the towers falling, we came together. We looked out for one another, for the most part. One of my favorite memories of New York at that time was that as the days went by, and the efforts at Ground Zero turned from search and rescue to search and recovery. Up to that point, missing posters covered every vertical or flat surface: every lamppost, scaffold, and billboard. Once rescue became unlikely, those pictures became makeshift memorials. The outpouring of grief from normally stoic New Yorkers was met by gestures of love and support. For a couple of months, New Yorkers, famous for being distant and standoffish, shared trauma that made the most relentless rat race of a city stop and care for everyone within its limits, native or not. It was far too brief a moment.

Even our military effort was initially a noble form of retribution, framed in a manner not unlike our entry in World War II. We were provoked and would retaliate against the group that hurt us, as well as anyone who gave them aid and comfort. That’s about when things got weird.

I remember being told how scared we should be, and that we would fight this fear with the most powerful military on the planet. I remember being told that people who previously had nothing to do with what happened—Iraq, specifically—had to have known about the attack in advance and absolutely had to be involved. Then the parts of our brains that see shapes in the dark and patterns in the stars were left to complete the picture: they’re all Muslim and therefore evil. If you don’t believe that, then you’re not a patriot, and the terrorists win. Who knows, maybe you’re one of them? It was a viewpoint that over the last 19 years got shifted toward more and more brown people, and it’s a rabbit hole we are still going down today.

We’re told every year, “Never Forget.” We’re then shown footage of planes speeding into buildings and screaming people on the ground, covered in ash and dust as they flee destruction. But that’s the part that’s sensationalized to keep us afraid. There’s more to remember. Remember that afterward, we cared about our fellow humans. We stood together. We lent a hand. We cared about each other’s struggles as if they were our own and worked together to shoulder the burden. These are the things we should teach our children. These are the things we should never forget.

Be warned: if we continue to treat each other as the enemy, then the real terrorists—people who shout at you and tell you how afraid you should be, people who tell you about the “they” who are not like “us,” the people who say to you that they alone can save you—get what they want.

These people have names like Donald, Mike, Rudy, and Mitch. If we continue to stay divided, then the terrorists win.

#Sept11 #neverforget #wearebetterthanthis #nycstrong #writer #author