I hadn’t owned a TV in years. So on 9/11/01, I would have had to make a special effort to watch the news. Rather than go to a friend’s house in order to see, and not just hear about, what had happened, I purposely avoided all televisions until producers saw fit to finally discontinue replaying the hellish minutes that permanently mark time in the US.
I have yet to witness the Twin Towers crumbling in a cloud of human debris, melting glass, and cement-turned-to-chalk-dust, or the smaller horrors of that immense day. It was a matter of sanity. At that time in my life, it took very little to shatter the fragile healing I had managed after a childhood full of violent land mines.
I intend for memories of this catastrophic event to be only shadows in my mind’s eye (forever), unless we can retrieve and view the physical past once we’re dancing among angels. Even then I may decline the opportunity.
I could go on at length about childhood trauma being revived in the wake of the attacks, and how I fell apart between breaths. I could tell how my body didn’t know the difference between real fear of being attacked from foreign terrorists and old fear of being abused at home; both felt like hungry tigers at my door well into spring. But I won’t.
In the weeks immediately following the Terrorist attacks, I wondered how many other living ghosts wandered through their life hanging on by the few responsibilities only they could tend. For me it was raising my first son, then still a baby. I wondered how single people living “carefree” and alone did not go out of their minds in panic. I would have.
I remember the thin silver lining of the weeks following 9/11. Headlines focused on real people, heroic acts, the importance of family and unified effort- almost completely ignoring celebrities. Oh how I hoped that, forever-more, we might leave off being concerned with some actresses fashion fumble, or detailed reports of another athletes misconduct in a bedroom where he didn’t belong.
I don’t know if, over the last ten years, we’ve gotten better or worse in this regard. I did notice the lack of continued headline reporting on the earthquake victims in Haiti, what they still need, what is going well, and stories of their heroes. I haven’t seen anything about reconstruction in Joplin, how the folks in Missouri are supporting one another, or major reporting on how the recently displaced in Texas are getting through, But almost any hour of the day, I can pull up yahoo news and get a briefing on who rocked it on a red carpet.
I wonder if daily reading of Front Page, national stories of real recovery, service opportunities, and human triumph would give us a renewed faith in mankind, or rather, would help us develop positive faith in the reachable potential of every person to shine instead of negative faith in our collective ability to destroy.
