Month: September 2011

  • 9/11…ten years later.  A nation changed, right or wrong.

    Ten years ago, a few months after 9/11, I was interviewing for a position at the Cornell University affiliated hospital in the upper east side of Manhattan.  Though the position had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks, the subject was nonetheless unavoidable.  He had to talk about it.  Everyone had to talk about it.  So talk about it we did.  They steadied themselves for an indefatigable onslaught of patients, but the patients never came.  I remember that my interviewer talked about how emotionally afflicted they all were because there were no patients.  I also remember at the time thinking that this professor of medicine was extremely selfish for feeling that way.  He survived.  Thousands did not.  Damn him for being upset that he did not get to practice medicine that day.

    It is only now, ten years later, that I finally understand why he felt the way he did.  You see, when faced with the most unimaginable of terrors, the most horrific feeling is not fighting evil and losing but rather being rendered into a state of impotence, unable to do anything at all.  He could have ran out of the city but instead he chose to stay and fight in the only way he knew how, by saving lives.  And when there were no lives to save, that is when the enormity of it all hit him.

    The United States has received a lot of criticism from the world at large (mostly it seems from citizens of our NATO allies) in the ten years since–xenophobia, colonialism, what have you–and the criticism is not without merit.  Yes, things did not always go perfectly and we pissed a lot of people off along the way, but they do not understand that we could not just sit back and do nothing.  We had to do something.  It is easy to swim in a pool of water and second guess the actions of someone trapped in a burning house.  It is easy to criticize a rape victim for purchasing an illegal gun when you are sitting in your living room in a gated community watching reality TV.  I did not lose anyone in my life that day, but I remember my heart breaking when the nurse next to me screamed hysterically after finding out that her brother went to work that day in the Twin Towers.  I remember the paralyzing fear I felt while I counted every second until my friend in NYC let me know that she was okay.  I remember seeing the pictures of the people jumping to their deaths.

    It is almost comical when I think about how much of the criticism levied towards us is from people living in countries that in their lifetimes did not suffer the same kind of attack that we did, countries where people, after having free health care and education, wage violent protests because university tuition is going up, they do not have the job they think they deserve or they do not have the type of pension they want.  People forget that we are born in an act of violence, pushed out of our mother’s womb bathed in blood, creatures unable to fend for ourselves as newborns.  Life is hard, but that is easily forgotten, quickly buried beneath the curse of modern prosperity.  It is no coincidence that those less removed from strife, those in Israel and Eastern Europe, are less critical of our actions than their neighbors to the west.  And here in the United States, the same goes for those entitled by virtue of destitution or excess.

    These past few days all the talking heads have been questioning whether, at the ten year anniversary of 9/11, it is time for America to move on, get over it, forgive…and seek penance.  And they just do not get it.  We are a nation changed, but now is not the time to say whether our subsequent actions were right or wrong or whether we should forgive.  This time should be reserved to remember the heroes who fought evil and fell, the children left without mothers and fathers, and most of all the innocent people who were rendered into a state of impotence, unable to doing anything at all except to jump off those towers holding the hands of another.