My cousin's youngest boy plays for the Duke Blue Devils football team. He plays on the special teams and last night's 45-17 stomping of the North Carolina A&T Aggies was his first game. It was also Duke's first win, bringing their record to 1-1. I ain't sayin' that's because of Little Cousin being in the game, I'm just saying.
Anyhow, his birthday is in November and he'11 be 18 years old. That means he wasn't born when the Twin Towers went down. I think his older sister might've been a baby, & she's at Ole Miss. His oldest brother's finishing up at Mississippi State this year and he was building bridges back then. That's another story, though.
Twitter has been filled with 9/11 thoughts today. It's not only the anniversary, that's wild enough. It's the twentieth anniversary, and the reason I mentioned my cousin's kids is that it's been 20 years since that morning, and that is a big deal. Where were you when they fell? If you were old enough to remember, you know where you were.
I was two hours into my shift in the kitchen at the Grill in Athens, GA. I had just recently come back to working there almost exclusively, having just quit my music editor's gig at Flagpole. I was still writing but was rapidly losing interest/hope/enthusiasm for making that lifelong goal a reality. I was also dealing with a broken heart and a bruised ego, but that's another story.
We had a CD player in the kitchen and I was playing probably AC\DC or the Beat Farmers when the manager came up. Turn on the news, he said, and we listened as the second tower went down. I don't remember if anyone came in apart from the street people. It was like a holiday when the kids were gone, Downtown was so empty. We were all glued to the radio.
Around 10 a.m. my brother came to work his wait shift. Listen to my heart, he said. Do what? But I listened and his heartbeat was... erratic. It's really hard to explain, but the beat was off, but there wasn't a recognizable pattern. [Girl he was dating] noted it this morning, and within 30 minutes, enough people had pointed out That Wasn't Right and he went to see a doctor.
So that was my 9/11, spending all day worrying that my 23-year-old brother might have a heart problem. I really didn't give the goings-on in New York City until I'd heard back from him. For the record, there's a particular name for what it was, but it's not arrhythmia, and so long as he stays off the cocaine train, he's okay. Might be something to worry about when he's older, like my damaged heart valve, but it's okay.
Anyway. I get home from work and realize, holy shit, the world changed today. I spent the evening watching the nonstop news, like most of the world, and I remember how curious I was when blame was laid on al Qaeda the next day and learned the name Osama bin Laden. I remember hearing everyone from German anarchists to homegrown dirtbags. It was a couple of days before the conspiracy theories about who was really involved and what really happened and why everything we saw on tv couldn't have happened.
For the record, I think a group of 19 or so assholes hijacked a couple of planes. Two hit the World Trade Center, another hit the Pentagon, and a third was brought down in Pennsylvania. I'm not sold on that being either a case of the plane being shot down or brought down due to the actions of the passengers or a combination thereof.
The internet is filled with how 9/11 changed people or how they were forced to change the way they made it through the world. This isn't that. My brother pointed out that something like this happened all the time in the Middle East or South America or somewhere that wasn't us so we didn't worry about it. I will say the reaction the U.S. government had and the steps they took helped push me even more to the left but I was going that way, anyway.
It is a pivotal moment in American history, though, like when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger exploded. If you were there, you remember it. I don't think the death of either bin Laden or Saddam Hussein had the same impact, not really. I remember being more weirded out by the college kids partying, but as a friend pointed out, the boogeyman of their youth had been killed by the U.S. government and all was right with the world.
I think what's stuck with me most about 9/11 was how quickly we got over it. Really, it's been a bloody shirt nationally for quite a while and the death of 3,000 people happens every two weeks in Mississippi because of COVID-19. You kids who were around or weren't paying attention really don't understand how the culture was and the press was. You were called objectively pro-terrorist if you disagreed with anything from the Bush Administration, even if it had nothing to do with national defense or terrorism.
There were marches, huge marches in major cities and smaller ones in places like Athens, but they were basically ignored. The media was embarrassingly pro-war, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq. They gave Administration claims little or no push back much less scrutiny, and the Administration said some dumb shit. Columnists called protestors the fifth column and didn't admit those marchers were actually right until a decade later. Seriously. Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf, S.E. Cupp; they all dropped the ball and they all try to pretend they didn't.
And life on the internet? Well, social media wasn't as ubiquitous as it is now. You actually had to have a probably expensive computer and pay the phone/cable company for access, and even then, you might not have been plugged into politics. There were blogs and chat forums and message boards, though, and the same crazies you see now were flapping their word holes back then in much the same way. You just didn't know about it.
There is so much more to it, like how it affected Muslim-Americans or people who looked sort of Muslim, and that was good enough. There was the realization that something significant had changed since the '60s since all the marching and protesting accomplished squat before it was all over, mainly because The Powers That Be didn't have to pay us any attention.
There was no togetherness or unity. There was "us" and "them," and where you fell on that line seemed to change from day to day. Freedom fries and Old Europe. The only verified case of cancel culture happened when the Dixie Chicks barely escaped with their lives. For the only time in his life, Bill Mahar said something truly controversial and was punished enough that he never did it again. Every hiccup was the terrorists' second shot, be it a power outage on the East Coast due to a spilled Diet Coke or a mislaid backpack in front of the law library on campus. Why would a backpack be on a college campus, after all?
To wrap that all together like some particularly depressing Christmas paper, there was the distinct possibility that the most powerful man in the world was a goddamn idiot being manipulated by some of the worst human beings in history. It was a weird, stupid, silly, scary time and if you were paying attention to national politics or the big-time press, nothing that's happened in the past five or so years is inexplicable. You just now started paying attention because everyone has a smartphone and computers are cheap nowadays.
So, what did we learn from all this? Did we learn anything? Was there anything to learn? What was crazy then - the PATRIOT Act, taking your shoes off to fly, weaponized patriotism, etc. - is common nowadays and we probably won't go back. I don't know what to think about that. I don't think I'll ever know.
Do you? Anyhow, have a nice weekend.
