September 10, 2002
Like a lot of people, I’ve been exasperated by the 9/11 anniversary media thrash. And, conversely, I’ve been exasperated by some people who seem to be copping above-it-all attitudes about it. It’s news that human beings deal with anxiety and shock by making a fuss about it? Perhaps sentient entities operate differently on your planet.
As I keep trying to say, 9/11 wasn’t a symbol for me, or a national turning point, or proof of the superiority of my political views. The World Trade Center was my local mall. It’s where I bought my jeans. The Borders bookshop kept my Starlight anthologies in stock. That underground mall had one of Manhattan’s more tolerable public restrooms. (Believe me, New Yorkers keep track of these details.)
When I cycle to work—about five miles door to door, from Park Slope to the Flatiron Building—the WTC is just a few blocks off my route, if I take the Brooklyn instead of the Manhattan bridge.
They attacked my neighborhood. They blew up my mall. They killed my neighbors.
Some bloggers have decided to lecture us about “perspective.” After all, why all the fuss? 9/11’s body count is nothing compared to AIDS in Africa, or name your genocide. Well, of course we should care about the woes of the world, and you know something? Often we do. Does that mean we have to shut up about our own lives, because people are suffering somewhere else? Obviously nobody would put it like that, because then it would sound as silly as it is. But more than a few bloggers aren’t above copping a little morally-superior attitude, if they can get away with it.
Here in New York, watching the towers burn, and hearing them fall, wasn’t an argument about moral perspective. It was loud, overwhelming, and horribly immediate. We had all kinds of emotions, many of them simultaneously. We were angry, and scared, and resolute, and depressed. We had our moments of crystalline “moral clarity” and, less often admitted to, our days and weeks of doubt. As you may have heard on your planet, human beings frequently deal with this sort of thing by talking about it a lot. I’m interested to hear that some people of my acquaintance are above that sort of thing. Well, no, actually I’m telling a lie. I’m not interested at all.
I don’t know why Electrolite consistently gets more hits than Making Light, except that maybe the range of subjects here tends to be closer to the core interests of politics-and-current-events blogdom. But that Teresa Nielsen Hayden person can be a dead sharp political writer. She’s got a new post saying all this, except more gracefully, more vigorously, and without the stupid bits. Here’s a taste. Go read it all.
Here’s the public stuff: Tomorrow the fife & drum corps of the departments that lost people will march in from the outer boroughs, a long march starting very early for some of them, and there’ll be a service at the site. Nobody’s giving any new speeches, just reading a couple of old ones we’re all fond of. There’ll be uncountably many other memorial services in the city, with a whole second wave of them towards nightfall. About a zillion candles will be lit. I’ll be out there with my neighbors, not because the media is making a big fuss about it, but because we need to do it, and want to be there. […][07:01 PM]I have not the slightest doubt that some of tomorrow’s observances will be overdone, by some people’s tastes. We do that here. I also have not the slightest doubt that the news media will say some stupid things about it. Repeat after me: What the news media does is not my problem. This is not about them.
Exactly. Well said, and finally what I have been trying to say. I am not a native New York City boy: I grew up on LI, and wanted to be there. When I lived there full time (probably around the corner from you in the Slope), I knew I was in the place where I wanted to be. When I moved upstate, I missed NYC, and when I hung out my shingle, my partner and I established an address at 140 Broadway, because we knew that the City was where we would be for a significant part of the time. Even though I was in Buffalo last year, my first thought, after making sure that none of our people were downstate, was for the people where I had lunch twice a week, and the people that I bought my copy of the Economist from, and my neighborhood. That is it exactly: it is personal because it is where so many mundane transactions took place. Mundane transactions that were a part of what connected me to New York. Thank you for saying it so well.
Bravo, Patrick!
For me, the WTC weren't just ugly 70s architecture, though they were that too.
They were where I finally worked, after nearly 20 years of commuting through them on and off (and I'd finally gotten the magic card that opened the doors on our floor, at last!). The Warner store where I got my stuffed Wile E. Coyote. The Lechters where I got my pepper grinder (OOB by 9/11, but still). Those PATH escalators I rode on a daily basis; they were in Koyaanisqatsi, remember? The...
Well, anyway.
I suspect ML doesn't get as many hits because she doesn't post quite as often, and because she's not as consistently political -- it's the political types who are hot for the latest bit of commentary, IME. Her quality, of course, is VERY consistent; that's why I check Making Light (and Electrolit) several times a day.
Thank you - I really appreciated this. Take care.
You nailed it :) I had a great discussion with a blogger that thought that way at my site:
http://www.paradox1x.org/archives/000289.shtml#000289
I summaried it as differences in "Distance, Time and Media." Same thing.
Nicely said, Patrick.
As you know, I have an long-standing abhorrence of orchestrated public spectacles of emotion; knowing that yesterday would be difficult for me no matter where I was, physically, I decided to avoid all the public fuss entirely.
I stayed home, which turned out to be a good thing. I had my first (and hopefully last) September 11th-related dream early Wednesday morning, full of fear and that awful _sound_ the buildings made, knowing that my child was there and I was not. This was, of course, totally a creation of my subconscious, as my child is 6 and was nowhere near the place, then or now. But one of the things I most remember about last year is that drumbeat in my head that said you have to get home safely because your child is waiting for you. And you have to do that NOW. No matter what. Which led to my walking to about 7 miles from Times Square well into Queens, all in one go (lizard brain function).
So after that dream, I didn't really sleep, and woke up with a headache so large that having my head squeezed in a vise would have been less painful. And managed to get the kid to school, where they had blessedly decided to have a 9/11 assembly only for the 4th and 5th grades, and allow the lower classes to have a normal day.
Then I went home and watched children's shows on PBS for several hours, until the world stopped spinning and I stopped crying every half an hour or so . . . at which point I became hungy, and went into the kitchen, where I looked at the clock for the first time in several hours, and realized that it was at just about that time, a year ago, that I was able to get my mother on the phone at last, and reconnect with my family for the first time since 8:00 that morning.
Which, to me, shows that my lizard brain was doing its job once again--keeping track, even though I was trying very hard not to keep track.
I saw none of the tv coverage. I think the people who could do that have more strength than I. The few bits of memorial stuff I have been able to watch this week have reduced me to a puddle pretty much every time, even the more technical ones.
Today, I am still grieving. And looking forward to Yom Kippur, which, though also about grief, may help me set this heaviness aside, at least for another year.
How could people tell you to get perspective? I remember how traumatizing the 1989 earthquake was to those of us in the SF Bay Area. That was a natural disaster and very few people died. I had nightmares for months.
The destruction of the World Trade Center was so many orders of magnitude greater and done deliberately -- I can't begin to imagine how terrible that must be for New Yorkers.
Berni - neither can we. We don't know how terrible it is, not yet. Oklahoma City people say they aren't over it yet, and it's been seven years.
Our city is still shaking. We haven't really started to rebuild, at all. Still clearing the mess.
I think we're helped and harmed (both) by Rule #1: Act Like Nothing Is Wrong. New Yorkers are going around trying to keep their lives and jobs going just as they were, or as if they're not traumatized. It's like taking a pile of cough suppressants and painkillers, instead of getting the antibiotics for your pneumonia. It enables you to keep going to work, but...
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
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