Reflections on 9/11, Part One: A Long Decade

Sunday will mark a decade.

September 11 is scorched into America’s psyche. The smoke. The tumbling bodies. The rumble, the rubble, and the clouds of dust. Men and women covered in white. New York became Pompeii. A hole in the side of the Pentagon; ragged shreds of metal strewn across a field. How could anyone forget?

Shaken and in mourning, we acted rashly.  We rushed to war– excuse me, crusade. We struck by air and by land. We cornered Osama, then misplaced him in the mountains. We killed innocents along with al Qaeda.  We lost more brothers and sisters.

At home, we sought revenge and practiced wrath. We judged blindly. Days after the attack, a Sikh man was slain as he planted flowers outside his gas station.  A Hindu temple, mistaken for a mosque, was firebombed twice in eight days.  We punished anyone who resembled our enemies; we pointed fingers at our fellow Americans.

Some fingers pointed towards Washington. Foul play was suspected; conspiracy theories bled out of our country’s open wound. Groups such as the 9/11 Truth Movement accused the government of perpetrating—or at least allowing—the attacks. Films such as Dylan Avery’s Loose Change and Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist spread the message to the masses.

However, it wasn’t just lone gunmen or conspiracy filmmakers who made assumptions. After that Tuesday we all began to second-guess ourselves and others. We looked over our shoulders on the airplane to double-check that the brown man in the seat behind us wasn’t doing anything fishy. We found him napping. Perhaps napping is part of the plot, we thought.

Ten years later, I’d like for us to have grown as a country. I for one feel I’ve come a long way from the ten-year-old who lived in a homogenous Philadelphia suburb and—I will admit—silently feared Arabs. It’s been a long time. I’m a much different person. But as a whole, we’re not as far along as one might desire.

Yes, we killed bin Laden, but our soldiers still sweat in the desert. Troops are slowly being withdrawn, but August was the most fatal month in the past year. Prejudice has bred like a fungus. We showed our ignorant stripes when plans to build a certain Islamic community center were not met favorably. President Obama was infamously and erroneously maligned for practicing Islam during his campaign. Conspiracies have hung about too. Last year one Angus Reid poll found that 15% of Americans still believed the Twin Towers fell in a controlled demolition. Most pertinently, conspiracy groups encouraged acting out against presidential authority en masse, and so have paved the way for the recent popularity of the Birther Movement and the government-wary Tea Party.

And of course, we still must struggle to bring a few meager ounces of necessary fluid effects in our carry-ons.

So is there hope for a complete journey home?  For some, certainly not. Some have already lost too much. Perhaps you know someone, or know someone who knows someone. For the rest of us, things are not back to normal either. We exist now in a new normality that we must accept. Perhaps one day this normality may resemble the one that existed before that Tuesday, but as of yet, it does not.

Not to say we haven’t made progress. The wars have grabbed their coats and hats. But the lingering ailments of prejudice and vast governmental distrust have yet to be fully assuaged.

Virulent intolerance can often only melt away through the cracks of generations, as America’s past cycles of hatred with regards to Germany, Japan, and England have. As is true with many maladies, the only remedy for us may be time. More time, that is.

If anything is here to stay, it’s governmental distrust. It seems to rank among death and taxes in terms of certainty.  Additionally, with the 2012 election hovering on the horizon, it will be on the up-and-up due to higher political tensions. Prejudice could be too.

On Sunday, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum will open at Ground Zero. The dead will be honored, the bereaved consoled, and the hallowed ground flooded by plaintive masses. As the world reflects upon the past tragedy, the new Freedom Tower will stand, unfinished, against a still-broken skyline.

This is part one of the Quad’s Reflections on 9/11. To read part two, go here.