A Single Day, A World Apart
Sep 11th, 2012 by Kimberly
It’s September 11, and the internet is filled with remembrances of what happened eleven years ago. You’ve probably read a lot about it, so I’ll keep this brief. I remember the day, but much more, I remember the days after. I remember being struck, as I still am, by the way that people can experience the same event and react to it in completely different ways.
Then as now, I lived in Los Angeles. I woke up that morning to the sound of reporters screaming through my clock radio that planes had hit the Twin Towers. The next second they substituted Twin Towers with Pentagon. Then they moved on to the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. I held my breath, waiting to see what the next city would be, afraid for everyone I loved, and for myself. I waited all morning for the next report of horror, incapable of letting my guard down. I wasn’t the only one. First thing that day, my boss went out and bought a television for the office, and my co-workers and I spent most of the day huddled around it. We watched each part of the broadcast as though it would bring an explanation for the inexplicable. It didn’t. My attempts to reach friends in New York failed, just like everyone else’s. That day, nobody said it out loud, but most of us were afraid to be alone. We moved in packs, our day to day grievances of who forgot to wash the coffee pot and whose turn it was to answer the phone all but forgotten.
I remember listening to the events that transpired on those planes, the tale of hijackings committed with box cutters. I thought to myself, there is no point to airport security. You can’t possibly keep all the dangerous things off an airplane. I had worked in prison ministry a few years earlier, and the parallels were unmistakeable. They give you the speech when you start about what you may not bring to prisoners – pencils, pens, toothbrushes. It is pounded into your head that anything in the world can be turned into a weapon, and will be. The airport, I realized, played by the same rules.
I decided that our only hope for peace in the skies lay in finding out why people did these things. We could try keeping the weapons away, but the crucial thing was to find out the motivation. Whoever had done this horrible thing had taken a long time – a decade, we were told – to plan these events. Something was driving them to it, and if we figured out what, maybe we had a prayer of stopping it before it happened again.
Our government decided that we needed to treat passengers in airports like they were visiting people in prison.
In the months to come, I would be told that Islamic jihadists had committed these acts. They were masterminded by Osama bin Laden, who put this all together because he hated freedom. In our attempts to find him, we bombed Afghanistan, a country that looked like it had been bombed before we got there.
Eleven years on, Osama bin Laden is dead, and our country is more polarized and xenophobic than I can remember. We as a country have gotten better at airport security, but we still know frighteningly little about the people with whom we share a globe.
When I was younger, I developed a talent for worrying about both extremes of an issue. I feared that I would stop growing at age ten and be shorter than everyone I knew, and the next second, I fretted that I would never stop growing and I would be the tallest person in the world. I seem to have perfected this talent now. I worry about my country’s security, but I also worry that if we keep trying so hard to protect ourselves from the bad people, we will have no freedom left for anyone to hate.
Kimberly was lucky. Her friends that were in New York were okay, and she is so, so very grateful.
Good article, Kimberly!
Although airport security isn’t any better! It’s all about security theatre. Sadly, leaders of both parties in this country, as well as we the people, are all about the quick fix instead of developing truly effective policy.
But as usual, a very thoughtful, insightful piece.
I remember seeing an interview with a Jihadist leader. His words were chilling. “You, America, you are so open. I can take the White House easily. At most it would cost four, maybe five, lives.”
Yet, I would not change that openness.
11 years later I have probably learned the best lesson of my life. That is; we will all die anyway, sooner or later. Unless suiside is on the table, we have no choice how we will go. But how we live is up to us, whether it be with love and compassion, or fear and hate. And, yes, I agree with Ericka, I would rather live with the risks that come with true freedom, than a pretend ‘security’.
Pushed send and forgot to correct suicide:(.
I completely agree with you- I worry about our country’s security and also about the danger that we might have so much fear within us at this point we might just sacrifice our freedom. BTW-I was also in Los Angeles for September 11th. Thanks for the great post!
Liza Wolff-Francis, Matrifocal Point