Remembering September 11, 2001

In a way, it's tough to really look back with much clarity on 9/11, because in many ways we are still living it. We're still fighting the "war on terror," still hunting for Osama Bin Laden and still dealing with terrorism on multiple levels. That being said though, September 11th was a giant wake-up call, and yet, here we are, five years later, and it already seems like the memory is starting to fade into a hazy fog of news bytes and random, flashes of sound and imagery that are now forever associated with that day.

And what's worse - it's all too easy to let anger or dissatisfaction with the Bush administration cloud our focus. It's easy to transplant anger towards terrorists and beam it in the direction of George W. Bush, but in the bigger picture, these terrorist groups are pretty indifferent ot whether a leader is Democrat or Republican, and what was attacked were the basic ideologies of America - that, more than anything, is what they hate.

So even as I type this now, thinking of the tragedy and the horror of what happened in September 2001, it is hard not to mix sadness with anger and wonder why it is that Bin Laden is still out there, why our President can single out an Axis of Evil yet pressure Israel to make a stopgap peace treaty with Hezbollah, why the war on terror has to mean abuses of power, greed-fed alterior motives, and a constant justification for a misguided and mishandled war in Iraq.

And on these counts, we have a right, as Americans, to be angry. Perhaps the most sickening thing to come out of the post-9/11 world was the sudden mindset that people who disagree are somehow traitors to the country. Just because the events of 9/11 were so black and white - that doesn't mean that everything else is. It doesn't mean that a war in Iraq is automatically equivalent to fighting the war on terror. It doesn't mean that free speech has to be compromised, or that the desire for unity equals a need to conform or be cast out.

But in any case, that is why it's hard to look back just yet. We are still, as a country, trying to figure out what the hell 9/11 meant, and what to do about it. In Washington, you have an old-guard regime, or people who wish they were the old-guard, who saw us get attacked, whose eyes lit up, who said "Yes, we know what to do here, it's jsut like the old days. We'll lace up our boots, wave our flag and gun down the fascists who dared to attack the greatest by-God country in the world." Sorry boys, things are different now - and there's never going to be another Big One like World War II because things are so much more complicated now than we thought things were back then.

I mean, they are talking about bringing Al-Jazeera to the US! We have model US citizens taking flight training courses with the intention of hijacking a civilian airliner. The dominant political party in our country represents the conservative movement, which now stands for serving the religious right, the oil companies, the gun manufacturers, and the neverending war in Iraq - wrapped up for all to enjoy in one tidy little, messed-up package. And the liberal movement is basically a bunch of platform-less whiners whose mani platform is bitching at everything the conservatives say and do, which puts them i nthe strange position of having to prove that they are tough on terror yet anti-war. But ... I'm sorry, how are those two different again? Okay, putting down the Kool-Aid now. I mean, wow, it was only months ago that people were burning Dixie-Chicks CD's for, praised-heavens! - an anti-war song! Nope, sorry folks, we're a long way from the Uncle-Sam-Wants-You days of the 1940's.

So since trying to wrap our collective heads around where we are as a country since September 2001 is clearly a bit premature (I'm stil lwaiting for Frank Miller's soon-to-be-released Batman vs. Al-Queida comic book, that should sum it up pretty well ...) , let me remember the day itself on a smaller scale.

Five years ago today ... wow, seems forever-ago when I think of it like this, I was a sophomore at Boston University. Only recently had I moved back to Boston for my second year as a then-journalism major, and I was still getting accustomed to my new suite in Shelton Hall on scenic Bay State Road. It was an interesting building - it was said to be haunted by the ghost of Eugene O'Neal, the famous playwright, who died there back when it was still a local hotel. But I wasn't worried about ghosts. I was more worried about my new living situation, a two-room suite shared with a somewhat random group of friends - I think I was kind of the common link between them. On one side of the suite, the bigger side, when you first walked in, was the room belonging to myself and Dan "Remdog" Remin. On the other side was an interesting reality-show-waiting to-happen - my friends Aksel and Dan Levin shared that room. Anyways, on that Tuesday, I was up early. Had a doctor's appointment - I think my first in Boston, which was kind of nerveracking, I mean it always is when you go to a doctor for the first time apart from the one you've probably been seeing since you were an infant. In the waiting room, I could hear a radio faintly in the backgound, but was only half listening. But I started to pay attention when I heard the receptionists talking baout the report intently. Something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center ...? An accident? Did it collapse? Was it on TV? My curiosity was piqued as I went in for my appointment, and as I exited I asked if there had been any update. That's when the word "terrorism" came into play, and at that point it was obvious that this was something BIG. I ran to the T after my appointemnt - it was still early, and already the chatter was starting. Previously, I remember, the big talk in the news had been a smattering of shark attacks and the mystery of Gary Condit and the scandal surrounding his missing former intern (whatever happened with that?). A slow summer for news had just been blown wide open. I rushed back to my apartment and turned on the TV. Of course we didn't get cable (BU policy), but it didn't matter - every network had the same thing. I think only Dan Levin was home as well, and the next few hours are basically a giant blur as I try to recall them. I just remember staring at the TV, in shock and horror, watching Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw try to make sense of what was going on. The seasoned newsmen were all equally steadfast, yet the sense of disturbing history-as-it-happened was all too palpable. The second tower went down as I watched, feeling sick and frozen, and then as the afternoon approached, I had class. What was I supposed to do? Were people going to actually go? I remember clearly going to my British Literature class, taught by this ancient professor. There was no way I could concentrate on Chaucer or whoever at the moment. I had to get out of there. But to my disbelief, the class was going on as usual! Early on, some guy raised his hadn, or maybe it was a girl, can't remember. They said that they had family in New York and had to leave and check up on them. The professor allowed it, but still, the class went on! After two excruciating hours, mostly spent, mentally, somewhere far away, as I furiously doodled Captain America, Superman, and Uncle Sam in my notebook, I ran home again, and kept watching TV, glipping between the networks, where Telemundo had become CNN and QVC as well. Soon I had another class - journalism. The professor there was a tough woman - no-nonsense. So after a bunch of bleary-eyed students dragged themselves to class (and surely there were a few who didn't bother to show up), the professor almost looked eager to exploit the opportunity at hand - this was what journalism was all about, she said, these kinds of moments. So get to work, get online, and write me a story about everything that's happened so far today. Holy crap, I didn't know if I could do that. If I was going to write anything, it would have to be some fantastical tale where Superman swooped in and saved us all, where a supersoldier named Steve Rogers high-tailed it to the middle-east and whooped some terrorist ass same as he did Hitler's in the Big One. So as I tied not to pass out, I somehow wrote my story, and I may have decided then and there that I was not cut out to be a newspaperman.

But of course, being a jounalism student in late 2001 and early 2002 meant a constant stream of assignments that ineveitably related back to September 11th. In one article about the possibility of a draft, dated 10/4/01, I wrote:

"At this point it appears doubtful that a draft will become necessary, with increased emphasis on covert missions carried out by highly-trained special forces units. Still, a generation of America’s youth realizes that new challenges and serious threats loom in their horizons. Whether or not they decide to trade in their joysticks for machine guns, or even their MTV for CNN, Generation Y finds itself redefined by the tragic events of September 11th."

But anyways, if I remember correctly, that was the last class I had that day. Once again, I ran home to Shelton Hall, this time with all of my roommates present, and once again, I was glued to the television. My friends and I tossed around theories, ideas - what would happen now? But the story kept evolving and becoming more horrific. The Pentagon - that was just even more unbelievable. The third plane, so amazingly dramatized recently in United 93. The uncertainty about Bush - this is who we have in the White House at this particular moment in time? And of course, being at BU, with so many people hailing from NYC, from CT, from New Jersey - everyone was worried about someone, or worried about someone who was worried about someone. And again, since we were in Boston, we felt at the center of it all, in our own way. After all, the flights had been from Boston to LA, the terrorists operating out of our own Beantown prior to the hijackings. Every day there was a new worry - Copley Square was closed off numerous times as various bomb threats were reported. There was the whole anthrax scare. Every sporting event became , simultaneously, a forum for patriotism and a potential terror target. And everyone kept talking about how Warren Towers was the largest non-miliatry residence in the northeast or something, and how in all of Boston it was one of the biggest potential targets for a terrorist attack (and everyone wondered if, in the event of an attack, those damn elevators would actually work properly ...).

And then there were all the weird little cultural things that happened as a result of that day. One of the weirdest things I remember was that Aksel had tickets to a John Mellencamp concert which I think was on September 12th. None of us wanted to go (I think Aksel may have went?), but at the time I just couldn't comprehend pumping my fist to "Hurts So Good" and enjoying it as I would normally. Suddenly, in those months, all the comedians became serious (though The Onion did the nearly impossible - published a special, post-September 11th edition that was both moving and hilarious), and suposedly, irony was dead (I guess nobody anticipated that, five years later, a bunch of bloggers would be ironically anticipating the release of a movie called Snakes on a Plane ...). The New York Times was suddenly a hot item on e-bay, and I began saving every week's issue of Newsweek, with my usual collector's instincts ratcheted up as each new newspaper, magazine, etc felt like a piece of history-in-the-making. And oh yeah, radio stations stopped playing a bunch of random songs from the likes of everyone from Drowning Pool to John Lennon. Thanks for the sensitivity, guys.But yeah, it was a weird time to be a college student, a weird time to turn 19 years old, which I did a few weeks after September 11th, 2001. Just before that happened, I wrote a try-out piece for the Daily Free Press at BU that never got published. I wrote:

"Our generation has never really had a purpose. We have never had a cause ... Our lives are often defined by fantasies and banalities – concerts, shopping, fashion, movies, television ... Will our generation step up to the plate as our grandparents did and leave a legacy of strength and heroism? Most likely, we’ll remain in our bubbles checking stocks and IM’ing our friends and watching the world change through the pictures on our television screens. But maybe something else has changed ... All I know is that on September 28th I turn 19 – but that doesn’t seem to mean quite so much now... although my birthday was still a few weeks away on September 11th, I feel that I, and maybe some of you too, already did some serious growing up."

So, has anything changed? Yes, everything has, of course. The landscape of the world has irrevocably changed, and yet, it feels like we are in this kind of holding pattern, still waiting, still waiting, for the other shoe to drop.

In the meantime, we just continue to do what we always have - overreact to the little things (leave those water bottles behind) , underreact to the big picture (aka the real war on terror), puff out our chests and make bold declarations, and lower our heads and look back in sad remembrance, and ask all the usual questions that have yet to have any real answers materialize (Are we safer? More secure?).

But I guess my point is, the reason why I'm even writing this, is that the worst thing, the worst thing that there can ever be when tragedy strikes, is denial.

So I'm sure I'll go to work on Monday, tommorow, or today, or yesterday, depending on when you read this. I'll plug away and eget through my daily tasks, and likely be surrounded by people with the usual jokes and smiles and complaints that accompany every Monday, the same routine that keeps people from focusing on anything other than the immediate tasks at hand. But probably, like that day five years ago, I'll be doodling an S-Shield on a scrap of paper, and imagining and reflecting and mentally wandering and wandering what happens next and thinking, as will many of us: "Has it really been five years already?"