9/11 Flashback, a 2014 Repost

The essay below was published in 2004. My 9/11 post for 2014 has been published at BlogHer.com at this link.

The following article was originally posted at AuthorsDen.com in 2004. I wrote about 9/11 in 2011 on the 10-year anniversary as well, a whole seven  (7) years after my first reflection, and now 10 years since I wrote my first reflective piece about 9/11, here I am again contemplating another that should be up tomorrow. I decided to repost the first piece here at Whose Shoes Are These Anyway in preparation for reflecting on tomorrow's post. 

September 11, 2004

"September 11 Photo Montage" by UpstateNYer -
Own work; derivative work of the following:
File:WTC smoking on 9-11.jpeg by Michael 
Foran on FlickrFile:DN-SD-03-11451.JPEG
by the United State NavyFile:UA Flight 175 
hits WTC south tower 9-11 edit.jpeg by
TheMachineStops on FlickrFile:WTC-Fireman
 requests 10 more colleagesa.jpg by the
US GovernmentFile:Flight93Engine.jpg by
the US GovernmentFile:Video2 flight77 
pentagon.png by the United States Department
of Defense. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
via Wikimedia Commons.

I don't keep track of days well, and I was out late last night tending to business in Woodbury, NJ, almost two hours from my home in Scotch Plains, something that had to be done. Slept in this morning. If I hadn’t been checking out the work of fellow writers today on the Web, I wouldn't even know it was 9/11. My brother just missed death that day. He was pissed at his bosses and told them he wasn't coming in; otherwise, he'd have been under The Towers when the planes hit.

I'd come in from doing what I do on most days to see hell on the news; I’d been chauffeuring a kid and had crazy phone messages on my voice mail. “Nordette, turn on the news. They say the people have flown a plane into those World Towers in New York. I can’t reach Ben.” That was my mother, who’d confused TV news before. So I frowned at the phone.

Next message. “Nordette, call Mom. I can’t get through. Tell her I didn’t go to work today. Remember the damned Macy people pissed me off yesterday and I called in. Tell her I’m okay. I wasn’t at The Towers.” That was my brother. He’d told me the night before he wasn’t going in. He’d been working lots of overtime and had been asked to check up on a security issue that a staff person could handle. But something must be going on. My brother didn’t mix up the news.

The first CNN image I saw remains embedded in my brain, a plane crushing a glass and concrete titan, driving through it like the tower was a block of cheap sheetrock ... then a burgeoning inferno. I remember thinking accident, but a second plane! I remember thinking war. I recall the gray cloud billowing downward, people bursting through it, fleeing toward the cameras, naked fear on dusty faces, and the first tower crumbling. Sometime later the second would also.

What Do We Gain by Remembering Events like the 9/11 Attack, Hurricane Katrina, and Other Tragedies?

As I said on Twitter yesterday, "I was in New Jersey when [the] towers came down. I've written about it before. I don't know if I want to again just b/c of [this] 10 year anniversary." I grappled with whether or not to write anything about September 11 a decade later because it took me until 2004, a whole three years after September 11, 2001, to write anything at all about what I felt on that tragic day. For me, the words I wrote then, "Emotional Land Mines (Remembering 9/11)," still stand.

In the last paragraph of that piece, I said in that essay the following:

The seconds we take to reflect humanizes us, sensitizing us again to the incomprehensible, inoculating us against the incredulous so that we will not be a people at risk like those Santayana spoke of saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We are stronger because we remember.

I did not start watching any of the memorial specials and documentaries in honor of the 10th anniversary until last night, and as I watched, I meditated on why it's still important, a decade later, to commemorate something so horrific as well as other moments of tragedy that draw sorrow to the surface. I meditate on our need to recall catastrophe each year when the annual Hurricane Katrina ceremonies begin here in New Orleans.

Why humans memorialize death and tragedy is a question studied frequently in Anthropology. For instance, this month the journal Anthropology News has published an entire issue on memorials and memorialization about not only how and why we are remembering September 11 and the destruction of The Towers and the 3067 lives lost but also how people in other parts of the world memorialize tragic events in their nations' history. It's a human thing to remember how death visits our lives.

The bombing of The Towers gave us a host of psychic demons to wrestle, and as I look back now, I see that just when I, an American, began to come to terms in 2004 with what I felt and experienced on September 11, 2001--a world-changing event that preceded a personal life-changing event, my divorce, which nearly killed me--my life was shaken again less than one year later with the flooding of New Orleans, my hometown. I have family members who lost their homes, left the city, and still have not returned. I live in a house that carries the quirks of reconstruction--missing light switches, different color schemes, the absence of heirlooms and old black and white photos, and sometimes sounds that make the head turn with expectations of seeing a loved one who is no longer here.

A writer, who is not from New Orleans and not African-American but wonders whether the nation and media have gone overboard with the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, sent me an email a few days ago with a provocative question:

Do you share my slightly sick feeling that we are being manipulated into this orgy of national mourning for an event that yes, was horrible, but the body count--a no less horrible phrase--was nearly identical to that of Katrina, and that's not counting the diaspora that followed and / or those who died of stress-related maladies, including suicide, thereafter?

I will not put her on the spot by mentioning her by name, but she asks a valid question. She is further troubled by the near-absence of black faces in the media flashbacks, the expert interviews, and various documentaries. I confess that I have made similar observations watching the memorial programs, not the official program from today with the family members at Ground Zero, but the retrospectives and documentaries that were run before today's official ceremony aired; however, I don't want to analyze such matters of absence at the moment.

Observations about the media coverage notwithstanding, I will be sending an email to my fellow writer later in which I will say:

"I do not consider the two events, 9/11 or the flooding of New Orleans, comparable historic events in any way that should cause us to examine how much attention one event gets over another in terms of equity. Both memories throttle my soul because I am an American as well as a daughter of New Orleans. But I do think that 9/11 was a bigger event psychically for the nation as a whole. Our fear of terrorism following that attack sucked us into two wars that touched families coast to coast."

And then there is that word "attack." Hurricane Katrina was not an entity endowed with consciousness and so was not capable of intending to attack anyone or anything. Even if we address the manmade failure of the levee system, we cannot impart to that failure a human desire to destroy someone. I think being the victim of intentional violence, knowing that someone hates you enough to kill you and your family, carries with it a different set of emotions.

The bombing of The Towers and the Pentagon on September 11 as well as learning through the crash of United 93 in Pennsylvania that a greater destruction was intended revealed to us Americans our vulnerability in this shrinking world. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, however, showed us our vulnerability inside this relatively young nation boasting of equality for all: the clash of race and class in creeping degrees of hostility and ugliness.

And yet, both incidents also showed us the breadth and depth of our compassion and generosity toward each other as Americans, as humans.

None of these thoughts, however, explains why we feel compelled to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 or why each year down here in Louisiana we continue to mark the day Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. But an idea of why we do what we do comes to me now perhaps more clearly than it did when I wrote "Emotional Land Mines."

Perhaps the reason for our compulsion to mark dates of great tragedy and recall them with the laying of wreaths, the unveiling of memorials, with art and payers is the need to remember how we as a people almost died, how we collectively faced near physical and emotional destruction. When we single out these dates, we reflect, we pause and recall not only loss and death but also that we are still here, that we are survivors, and with that recognition comes a sense of empowerment: We can survive tragedy. Knowing that we survived, we are better able to walk through dark tunnels into the unknown and face that light in the distance that could be a brilliant future or the damning headlights of a speeding train. Either way, we go on.

In addition to locating my old essay, while going through my files, I discovered a poem that I also wrote in 2004 with which I end this post, satisfied that I have given the 10th Anniversary of 9/11 the attention it deserves.

And We Go On
by Nordette Adams

Monday, September 13, 2004

Whittle an "S" on our chest:
Supernation!
… Charging all lights a brigade,
eclipsing amber waves
of obfuscation.
Boots and cape, red,
white, and blue,
zealous to leap 110 stories
of visceral weeping
for glory and honor
of our due
justice.

Liberty, lift up your skirt!
Rinse blood from its hem into the Hudson.
O! What is the cleanser that brings closure
to our pain?


© Copyright September 2004 Nordette Adams