Like pretty much everyone else in the country, I remember when I found out about Sept. 11. I didn’t have class in the morning, and when I staggered out of my bedroom around noon, I noticed that my roommate had taped pieces of paper everywhere: “TURN ON THE TV!”
I assumed something funny or wonderful had happened. Maybe President Bush had been eaten by liberal raccoons. I hoped I hadn’t slept through all the news coverage.
You know the rest, of course. Shock, incredulity, numbness, grief. Watching the news for hours, even when “The Simpsons” was on. Wanting it all to go away.
Two years and several days later, it still hasn’t. Of course not. Mass is conserved; so is memory. Once something has happened, it’s there, no matter how hard you try to forget it.
Not that anyone is trying to forget Sept. 11. You don’t just casually brush off something like the deaths of 3,000 people. A nation, no matter how populous, doesn’t recover quickly from losing that many citizens. It’s not the lost members’ contributions to the economy and the gene pool that are lacking; it’s an intangible, the human presence, mixed with that sense of U.S.-as-Biodome imperviousness that the Sept. 11 attacks, like Pearl Harbor in its time, took away.
But two years later, what should we be doing? I don’t know. It seems to me that deliberate remembrance won’t be necessary for several years, since no one is in danger of forgetting now. And yet, business as usual seems disrespectful to the victims’ families. But as anyone who has lost a loved one can confirm, business as usual seems disrespectful regardless of the date when you’re grieving. It’s obscene that molecular motion continues when you miss someone.
There were vigils and newspaper articles and official pronouncements, and I don’t know if they helped or not. I hope they did. Mostly, in these parts at least, it was business as usual last Thursday. Only one of my professors mentioned the anniversary of Sept. 11 in class, which was very strange — not because of the fact that other professors didn’t, but that she did. She is from Israel, from a country and a heritage thoroughly accustomed to more strife and danger and uncertainty than most people born in America can even begin to imagine. If Sept. 11 had happened in Jerusalem, Israelis certainly wouldn’t have taken it in stride. But I doubt they would have been particularly surprised.
We have it so good in the United States. True, we’re not at the top in health care or literacy or not electing morons or gender equality or life expectancy, but we still, even after Sept. 11, have safety and security — not to mention wealth — that much of the rest of the world can only dream about.
In light of that, I wouldn’t have been one bit surprised if the rest of the world had reacted to the Sept. 11 attacks with schadenfreude. Or at least, “Tough luck, America; now you know how it feels. Excuse us, we have to go bury some victims of famine/ AIDS/ war/ earthquake/ the totalitarian regime/ the latest 12 suicide bombings now.”
But they didn’t, at least mostly. We may be an arrogant nation and not as universally liked as we think, but a tragedy is a tragedy. Not only do we now know how the other nations feel, they know how we feel and can’t help sympathizing. It’s like catching your worst and blondest high school rival sobbing in the bathroom; you’re going to say, “Ohh, what’s wrong, honey?” not “Good! Keep it up.”
The one positive thing about tragedy, as addressed in every work of art on the subject since time began, is that it hits people in the core — where the real things, like kindness, live. I suppose that’s the soul, if you want to get technical.
And the other thing, more an after-the-fact justification than a real positive, is that the presence of tragedy makes you wildly appreciate its absence. It’s a blessing to be commemorating Sept. 11 instead of experiencing it, and I bet most of you agree that it feels like one.
Jackie May ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.
