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.