Wars and rumors of wars
For some reason it seems this particular anniversary of 9/11 is hitting home a little more than the last few. It’s been seven years now, but this is a major election year, the country is facing a lot of problems, and maybe people are just in a reflective mood.
Or maybe just I am.
I remember that morning. My alarm went off at 6:00 PDT, which was fourteen minutes after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. My alarm was tuned to NPR, and the headline was “plane has hit WTC.” I assumed it was a little Cessna plane, but it seemed like an interesting story, so I went to the TV to see if they had video. You know the rest. I remember watching all the smoke, hearing all the shouting, all the bewildering, panicked confusion. And then I thought I saw something–or rather I thought I didn’t see something: where was one of the towers? Before the newscasters asked this question, I was trying to see through the smoke. Is it possible? Did the tower collapse? And then someone (Matt Lauer? I don’t remember) said something like, “Say, where is the other tower? Do you see it? What happened?”
This year, this morning, MSNBC replayed the NBC coverage of that terrifying morning. It was riveting, but also hard to watch. It was odd to hear Tom Brokaw say, “We are at war.” He talked about how our lives were going to change, how we think about security–and our freedoms–was going to change. He was right about that.
What happened that day was a massive trauma, suffered by many millions of people. You didn’t have to be at Ground Zero, or the Pentagon, or Shanksville Pennsylvania–and you didn’t have to know someone who was there–to be traumatized. I think we’re still reeling from the event, at least in some ways. Having said that, I think it’s an exaggeration to say that “the world changed” that day. I remember going to work that day and talking with a friend of mine who had lived in Israel for much of her life. She said something like, “America is just finding out how the rest of the world lives. This is nothing new.”
And yet much has changed. The events of 9/11 inflicted an immense amount of anxiety on this nation, our culture, and much of the world. And we were pretty anxious already. It was at first an overlay of anxiety, or anxiety on top of anxiety–after all, who’s not anxious about something in their lives, in their relationships, in their homes and workplaces? But it has now (I believe) become an underlay, a barely perceptible hum of anxiety and tension that lies underneath our daily lives, our daily hustle.
I’ve written before about how national or global events can affect an individual person and even cause bouts of serious anxiety and depression. But even if you don’t feel that deeply about what happened seven years ago today, it’s a good idea to take some time today, to keep some silence, and to reflect on the many things that continue to challenge you–and all of us–in these anxious times.
