September 10, 2011
Tomorrow is Sept. 11. It is a date that is indelible in my mind, in all of our minds. Where were you when the twin towers were hit, when the U.S. was attacked? The burning question, but there are many such questions in my like; where was I when President Kennedy was shot? Where was I when the 1965 earthquake hit? Where was I when the space shuttle exploded? Where was I when Martin Luther King was shot? Where was I when the Berlin Wall came down? Some of these questions have an answer—I was at school when Kennedy was shot. I was in the bathroom during the 65 earth quake. But some are a blur, a memory of the event, with nothing particular to reference it to. But 9/11 was such a momentous occurrence, one that rocked the entire world, that everyone who has memory will remember what they were doing the day four jets changed the way we fly forever. For that matter, those four jet planes changed the way we look into the sky, the way we observe others, the way we notice articles left unattended, the way we feel as planes prepare for landing. We notice planes in the air now, because for a week of our lives, there were none.
And it changes how we, as Americans, see ourselves in the greater world. We are players, we have been included in the terror that has been going on in the world. We can no longer feel safe inside our boarders. Now, we must pay attention to the plight of the rest of the world.
We once were a great nation, but now we are a country that struggles to find what it lost on Sept. 11, 2001. We lost more than buildings, we lost more than lives, what we lost on that fateful day was our innocence. As T. S. Eliot states in Gerontion,
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now | |
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors | |
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, | 35 |
Guides us by vanities. Think now | |
She gives when our attention is distracted | |
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions | |
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late | |
What’s not believed in, or if still believed, | 40 |
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon | |
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with | |
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think | |
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices | |
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues | 45 |
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. | |
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. | |
| |
We are responsible for our actions. We reap what we have sown. We suffer with the world, and in doing so we should become compassionate, empathetic, generous, and heroic. Those who died on 9/11, died heroes, but those of us who are here now, reflecting on where we were during those historic hours, need to pause and wonder, “What does America represent?” Are we a country of hope or despair? I don’t know.
1 comment:
re: book review request by award-winning author
Dear When here and now cease to matter:
I'm an award-winning author with a new book of fiction out this fall. Ugly To Start With is a series of thirteen interrelated stories about childhood published by West Virginia University Press.
Can I interest you in reviewing it?
If you write me back at johnmcummings@aol.com, I can email you a PDF of my book. If you require a bound copy, please ask, and I will forward your reply to my publisher. Or you can write directly to Abby Freeland at:
Abby.Freeland@mail.wvu.edu
My publisher, I should add, can also offer your readers a free excerpt of my book through a link from your blog to my publisher's website:
http://wvupressonline.com/cummings_ugly_to_start_with_9781935978084
Here’s what Jacob Appel, celebrated author of
Dyads and The Vermin Episode, says about my new collection: "In Ugly to Start With, set in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, Cummings tackles the challenges of boyhood adventure and family conflict in a taut, crystalline style that captures the triumphs and tribulations of small-town life. He has a gift for transcending the particular experiences to his characters to capture the universal truths of human affection and suffering--emotional truths that the members of his audience will recognize from their own experiences of childhood and adolescence.”
My short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including North American Review, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. Twice I have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. My short story "The Scratchboard Project" received an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007.
I am also the author of the nationally acclaimed coming-of-age novel The Night I Freed John Brown (Philomel Books, Penguin Group, 2009), winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers (Grades 7-12) and one of ten books recommended by USA TODAY.
For more information about me, please visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Cummings
Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Kindly,
John Michael Cummings
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