9/11: Your feelings

OK, five years later, here we are. I've spent a sum total of six hours in New York in my life, and that was at JFK, so in many ways mine is not what might be viewed as a salient perspective. Nonetheless, I had a few things I wanted to get off my chest. Pardon me if this is a bit on the rambling side.

First, my life is not materially different from what it was five years ago. I still work. I rarely fly. I'm raising my kids as I see fit. I watch sports on TV and occasionally catch ER. I try to do right by those around me. I kiss my wife. Try to pay all my bills on time. Do Taebo. cut my grass. I am a little more emotional perhaps. Maybe I feel a little less safe, but I really don't think about it much. I know that every time a TV rerun flashes the twin towers in the background, every time I see a book at Barnes and Noble with the twin towers on the cover, every time I ride through my city and look to the skies around the tall buildings just to make sure no plane is zeroing in, my breath catches in my throat. Still does it, five years later. I know that my feelings about New York, which were disdainful before this, have softened a great deal. Before, New Yorkers were these obnoxious, arrogant people who dismissed the rest of the world. Mainly, this was fostered out of a few shared press boxes. Perhaps they (and yes, I know they include no small number of you) still are obnoxious and arrogant, but I'm much more tolerant of that now. Not just because I know they suffered an incalulable loss, but because it became apparent in the days and weeks following the attacks that they weren't all that different from me. They work, pay their bills and kiss their spouses.

We've had many disagreements on many subjects on this board, but I think on this we all can agree: We were all under attack that day. It's a history we'll share for decades to come, and hopefully we'll revel in the fact that we can debate it -- publicly and ad nauseum -- with little fear of retribution.

I know the feelings will be much more raw in New York and Washington tomorrow than they will be in my burg. But the feelings will be close to the surface across the country. I'll probably hug my kids a little tighter tomorrow. I'll take a little time to remember what happened. I'll hurt a little, and I'm sure most of you will too.

Have the terrorists won? Eye of the beholder, I suppose. The attacks spawned all sorts of things, many good, many bad. But the United States was not destroyed. We're still here, and we're all human.

 

I think we've fucked up huge, and I don't mean this to become an anti-Bush thing, although I'm sure it will turn into that.

For years in the 80s, all we heard was we'd never give up our freedoms in exchange for "security." Now we've done just that.

Partisan bullshit enters into every debate and every discussion. No one, politician or public Joe, seems capable of finding the appropriate solution and implementing it. We are in deep shit if this doesn't change and change soon.

On top of all that, we somehow have to fix the fucked-up entitlement and health care situations in this country, and all that $ is being earmarked for war. We're seriously fucked there, too, if that doesn't change soon.

During all of this, newspapers have plummeted in credibility and logic. Nearly all editorials are after-the-fact critiques, which isn't surprising since that's what newsrooms do these days. But it really doesn't show much intel or sense to wait for something to go wrong, then say: "Well, that was wrong."

In short, we suck. We suck.

 

We suck.

Yup, that about sums it up.

 

Maybe so, but the 49ers just recovered an on-sides kick with 31 seconds to go. Only down 7.

 

Oh, and I left out that the $ earmarked to make us "safer" has been used for pork and other unnecessary projects, which newspapers have failed to investigate for the most part.

 

That was sort of a parody (designers would call it parity) of my statement, as if I said the following:

You suck, spaceman. You suck.

 

Excellent post, Novelist.

I live fairly close to the city, and I think of 9/11 every single time I drive over a bridge, look at the skyline and wonder what else they had in mind that day. Bridges and tunnels were shut down moments after the second plane hit. Was the bridge I'm driving on a target?

I think of it whenever I see the Boggle box in our spare room. Seriously. The night before, my wife and I played Boggle and watched the Monday Night Football game (Broncos-Giants). I see that box and I remember how Sept. 11, 2001 feels like it happened yesterday and how Sept. 10, 2001 feels like a million years ago.

I remember the churning of my stomach as I saw the Twin Towers and realized I had at least one friend who worked there. I remember racing to the bathroom, not sure if could make it in time and not sure if I was going to throw up or shit my pants.

I worry that people in flyover country don't remember 9/11/01 because NY is a foreign, noisy, dirty different country to them. My wife says she heard some statistic that 35 percent of Americans don't remember what year 9/11 occured.

But if you were in the tri-state area, you will never forget 9/11, because you think of it every single day.

 

People in flyover country can't forget about it because it's rammed down their throats every day. I even heard one radio station say the best thing for the anti-terror effort would be for the Heartland to be attacked. Hopefully those DJs are eventually introduced to a windshield, face-first at 70 mph.

 

Shockingly, I agree with Dye on this. I'm sure we disagree on how to solve the problems, but once we can all agree on what the real problems are, we can start figuring out how to solve them.

 

I shouldn't have said flyover country. Ignorance rests on both coasts as well.

Eleven days after 9/11, my HS class (Connecticut) had its 10th reunion. It was a predictably muted affair, and some folks who were supposed to join us couldn't b/c of travel-related issues. The night before the reunion, I was at my parents house and a friend of mine who graduated with my sister in '93 came over. we were talking and I was talking about how worried I was every single minute of every single day. She said something like it was bad but it affected NY so she didn't really have to worry about it in rural CT. And I was like hooo boy.

 

huh?

 

As a resident of "flyover country" or red-state areas, whatever you wanna call it, I can assure you 9-11 still resonates with everyone here. Maybe it's because of the patriotism thing, or whatever, but 9-11 was a seminal event for everybody. People in NY and DC (and I was in D.C. on 9-11) may feel it a little more, but that's not to say the rest of the country doesn't feel it.