We'll go forward from this moment

[The Biff Lebowski]

www.ornery.org/essays/2001-09-12-1.html


We'll go forward from this moment
By Leonard Pitts September 12, 2001

It's my job to have something to say.

They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward's attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We're frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae -- a singer's revealing dress, a ball team's misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We're wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though -- peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people -- you, perhaps -- think that any or all of this makes us weak. You're mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

IN PAIN

Yes, we're in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We're still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn't a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn't the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel. Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You've bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there's a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We'll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.

THE STEEL IN US

You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don't know us well. On this day, the family's bickering is put on hold.

As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that's the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don't know my people. You don't know what we're capable of. You don't know what you just started.

But you're about to learn.

(c) 2001 The Miami Herald and wire service sources. Reprinted with permission.

[Rebel]

I remember reading this on September 12, 2001. It's one of the things that helped me start to figure out how to cope with our new reality.

On this day, my sincere thanks to the police, to the firefighters, and to the servicemen and servicewomen who risk their lives to keep us safe.

Here's one from today:

www.freep.com/article/20110911/COL01/109110492/Mitch-Albom-9-11-attack-victims-honored-NYC-memorial-moments-silence

Mitch Albom: 9/11 hurt us, changed us, but life, love could not be defeated
September 11, 2011

They are dead. He is dead. We are alive. We are changed.

They are dead.

You wish this anniversary could change that. You wish 10 years was some sort of MAGIC release date, that the murdered souls of Sept. 11 could return, their suffering ended, their incinerated bodies recreated from the dusty air of lower Manhattan and the rubble of the Pentagon and the muddy earth of a Pennsylvania field, allowed to pick up their lives wherever they were headed that morning, to the office, to the subway, to breakfast, to another city.

They are dead. That will never happen. Their children are teenagers now. Their teens are adults. They exist only in memories, in family stories, in photo albums and attic boxes and troubled dreams.

No roll call today will bring them back -- not even one read by presidents and governors. No etching of their names in a memorial will re-animate them. They stand as the fallen.

Not a single one was a target that Tuesday morning. Yet all of them were victims. It remains the most maddening fact of all, the randomness of terror, the idea that killing for the sake of killing ever could be viewed as a worthy cause.

They are dead. Nearly 3,000 of them. We cannot change that. But it can change us.

It has.

Is there any denying that?

** *

He is dead.

Osama bin Laden, 10 years after the mass murders he helped orchestrate, has himself been hunted down and killed, dumped in the ocean with a bullet through his head, no marker, no grave site, no mourners on hand. His end, unlike many he slaughtered, was not heroic. It was not memorable. He did not go out trying to save anyone but himself.

Even death -- which he often predicted would prove his salvation -- came to him in a dark, hidden place.

He lived in shadows.

He died that way.

He was remorseless and evil, some say the devil himself, but even the devil serves a purpose, if only to know how not to live your life. In the decade since he gloated over airplanes that killed thousands -- including 19 of his own that he willingly sent to slaughter -- bin Laden went from an uncatchable Satan to a pathetic desperado, making scratchy recordings to bolster his relevance, seeing his efforts to convert even fellow Arabs to his dogma thwarted and rejected.

In the end, he never again masterminded anything close to Sept. 11. His last images were of a pampered man bunkered in a Pakistan compound, with self-serving videotapes and a large stash of pornography. Hardly the accoutrements of a prophet.

He is dead. He haunts no more. A 10-year anniversary with bin Laden free would be a different day than the one we will experience today. But we swore we would get him and we made sure that happened. He once predicted, in an interview with Al-Jazeera, that "the U.S. government will lead the American people ... into an unbearable hell."

Yet he is dead.

And perhaps there himself.

***

We are alive.

All of us who wondered, "What if it happens again?" All of us who ever looked nervously out an airplane window, or eyeballed a suspicious passenger, or hesitated to enter a sold-out stadium, or woke up on previous Sept. 11 anniversaries panicked that the streets, the buildings or the skies themselves would not be safe -- we are still here.

We are alive. It has not happened. Yes, plots have been thwarted. Would-bes have been caught. We may never know the number of plans disrupted, discovered or discombobulated. But the most important fact is the most important fact.

No similar attacks.

Not in a decade.

We are alive. There's a reason for that. Either the enemy is less powerful and organized than our fears, or the numerous precautions we have (sometimes unpopularly) adopted are effective, or terrorism on a grand scale doesn't follow a 10-year time line -- you can have two attacks in six months and not another for two decades -- or we are just plain lucky.

But we are alive. We have learned to live with threat and shadow. We rise. We laugh. We work. We shop. Those who remember the financial markets, the dire predictions, the prevailing sense of doom that covered the fall of 2001 must admit how quickly the nation bounced back in many ways.

We are alive.

There is no more precious sentence.

And yet ...

***

We are changed.

It is foolish -- even insulting -- to think we have circled back to the day before the attacks. Too many wars fought. Too much hate exchanged. Too much fear. Too much disruption in our daily lives.

Think only of a trip to the airport on Sept. 10, 2001. You kept your pockets full and your shoes on. You packed toiletries, computers and scissors without concern. You drank a Coke while wearing a hat as you walked through a security screening that was, at best, perfunctory. You could drive onto a tarmac. You could bring your family to the gate to say good-bye.

We are changed. Pat-downs are a way of life. Locked doors. Mandatory IDs. Allow two hours. Stand on endless lines. The clogging of our daily activities done strictly for security is immeasurable. And there is no going back.

We are changed. Our tempers are shorter. Our anger is at a quicker boil. Our relations with Arabs and Muslims -- here and abroad -- have been bruised and battered and both sides fight distrust while working toward a new calm.

We are changed in how we view patriotism -- some are sick of the word, some think it is the only word that matters. But few can say it means no more today than it did the day before those towers started burning.

What we tolerate. What we expect. Is there anyone who feels as free and easy in this century as we remember feeling in the last? Doesn't watching the news always seem to carry some ominous backdrop? Aren't our nerves more hair-trigger now -- when we hear of an explosion, a car bomb, white powder in a letter or hidden gas somewhere in a subway?

We are changed. And yet, when we need to be, we are the same. There may be a different president, a different economy, today may even be a season-opening NFL football Sunday (almost a national holiday, that one ) but at churches and barbecues and monuments and rallies, when those images are rebroadcast and those names are recited and the plumes of smoke and the crumbling skyscrapers and the tapes of those brave passengers ("Let's roll!") are laid in front of us, we will be right back to where we were 10 years ago today, one nation, under God, crying our eyes out -- and then drying those tears in deference to 9/11's final lesson: that life and love does, and always will, go on.

[Rebel]

[Queenie]

[potthole]

I was a junior in high school on 9/11. On Friday night I was at a high school football game and before kickoff somebody gave a brief speech. Just being in that environment was so moving to me, by the end of the speech I was having to choke back tears.