2001 was a common year that started on a Monday. It was the 2001st year of the Common Era. We were in the afterglow of the Apocalypse aka Y2K. Looking back, things were a bit stale. The iPhone didn’t exist. Neither did the Great Recession.
New York City, specifically the World Trade Center harvested an unusual crop that year, set to transform the ideological landscape of the United States of America. George W. Bush was reading to little kids when he got the news. I was in my 5th grade classroom on the receiving end of a tearful memo. I don’t remember my teacher’s words, particularly if she used the phrase “terrorist attack.” I asked a question like, “But how big is it?”
What kind of anniversary is every passing September 11th now? Which words do we use for this day? Commemorate? How do we speak of a fallen family? We slide past each other now, wishing well and good luck, keeping it together. Our heavy hearts were lifted by Barack Obama’s words “hope” and “change.” We needed it then, and we still do. The question are you better off seems incoherent for a reason.
How many of us felt inexplicably wronged by the events on 9/11? This feeling is not because we lost lives in the rubble; it is because we felt wronged. Where was nature? Our safety in the new millennium turned out to be a farce. We were no longer safe in our industry, not safe in Manhattan, the Jerusalem of the new, globalized world.
September 11th was a day that thrust us into the American actual- the beginning of a new way of speaking about the US. We had a bloody open wound on the world-historical stage. The 2002 Olympics were hosted in Salt Late City, and we ceremoniously revealed and reveled in a tattered and ripped American flag recovered from the site of the twin towers. Since then, the American flag has become trendy in mall fashion, sitting on shirts in stores including American Apparel and Urban Outfitters. Tragically hip; emphasis on tragic.
In the years of the George W. Bush Administration, we watched the United States change out of the corners of our eyes, which were fixated on the Other, refusing to believe that this gaze also cast us inward to our own ugly parts.
On September 11th, 2010, I was at a Panda Bear concert at Governor’s Island in NYC. The nervous energy was palpable and the mood was somber as the WTC memorial lights shone triumphantly from across the Hudson. I wanted us to be ecstatic but we were heavy. I wrote a poem, “For the Post-9/11 Suburban Kids” based on this experience. It began, “don’t feel trapped” and it was meant to be read out loud.
This day marks a rupture. The way to observe is to celebrate the harvest and the way that it brings things to fruition.
And so when I see a flag at half-mast on September 11th, 2012, I get it.
Sally Reisch