Thursday, 11 September 2003 - 12:17 PM EDT
Name:
Marc
I don't know - I think the whole 'end of innocence' thing was phony and still is. I mean, the very same building had been bombed less than a decade before. And all I can remember from childhood news reports during the 80's is the Achille Lauro, Lockerbie, etc. And I guess, being a history nerd, I look at current events through the lens of the past. The capital of this country was once burned down by foreigners, you know. Actually, one of the first things I thought about on that day was the Barbary pirates.
I understand what you are saying about being disconnected. My first day back to work at Waldenbooks, one of my co-workers said something about 9/11 being like Pearl Harbor, and this being 'our war'. But there will be no victory gardens or rationing, so that even non-combatants are affected. Christ, we pay less taxes than we did at the start of the war.
I'm just not a real emotional person, so I never cried or flipped out or anything. But then I didn't cry when my father died, so it was unlikely that I was going to summon up a whole lot of emotion for people I didn't know. I think a lot of people in this country reacted the same way, a sort of quiet anger and then a decision made without a lot of agonizing or soul-searching: we are at war and Islamic terrorists are the enemy. If you read first-hand accounts of WWII (not Ambrose or any of those clowns), people weren't motivated by some abstract love of freedom or hatred of Nazis and Japs. They were just doing a job.
I think a lot of what you are reacting to - the orchestrated patriotism, the backlash, etc. - is just the media, which needs a story 24 hours a day. I know that I refused to put up an American flag after 9/11 for that very reason. I didn't feel that I needed to prove my patriotism to anyone, and I knew I would feel the same way long after the flags had come down. For the anniversary, I would have liked one of the networks just to replay their coverage from 9/11 all day long, instead of this memorial garbage.
Regardless of whether you knew someone who died, or were in NYC/DC at the time - it was absolutely real. It is the defining fact of the era between the defeat of communism and whenever we defeat these animals.
