I Was a Child
9/11 happened less than a month after I started college. It’s strange to think about — more time has passed, for me, between 9/11 and now than had passed between my birth and 9/11. It doesn’t feel like it; I suppose because as we get older, an individual year makes up less of a percentage of our lives. Anyway.
I had just turned 18 less than two months prior; which means I had also recently registered for the draft. And in the immediate aftermath of the attack, it occurred to me that it was not outside of the realm of possibility that I could be going to war. That’s a strange feeling for a kid that has only been living out of his parents’ house for two months.
Of course, it didn’t pan out that way. I was doing no such thing. America, broadly speaking, was going to war. I was going to college.
Now that I’m 38, I look back on my 18 year old self and realize I was a naïve child. But it was still the first, and most, genuinely traumatic event I experienced as an “adult.” I wasn’t home. I couldn’t just go run to my parents. I had to deal with it on my own. I wrote about my experience shortly after, and it’s become a weird time capsule:
I didn’t sleep well last night. I haven’t slept well in a few days. The late-summer heat wave has made my non-air conditioned dorm room nearly uninhabitable. I feel like I’m sticking to my mattress as I stare up at the ceiling. The sun has already brightened the room enough to render attempts at more sleep futile. From across the room, I can see that I only have a few minutes before my alarm clock goes off, so I begrudgingly jump down from my bunk, turn it off and start gathering the various items in my shower basket for the trip down the hall.
As I enter the communal bathroom, I pass my friend Adam as he leaves.“How’s it going?” I ask, as I often do, expecting his normal, nonchalant answer as he continued past me. This morning, however, he stops. His face is unusually serious.
“Did you hear?” he asks.
“Hear what?”
“Someone bombed New York and Washington.”
It takes a second or two for my brain to verify that I’d heard him correctly. Even having heard what he said, I can’t understand it.“What do you mean ‘bombed’?” My first thoughts are of military planes of a hostile nation flying over Manhattan and Washington and dropping actual ordinance on strategic targets. Who could possibly be doing that? Iraq? Iran? There’s no way they could logistically accomplish that. We would’ve seen them coming. The only ones close enough are Mexico and Canada, and they’re certainly not invading us. “Bombed?” That doesn’t make sense.
“Apparently some people hijacked planes and flew them into skyscrapers.”
“Are you serious? Who was it? Do we know?”
“Well, they think it was...guess who...”
“Bin Laden or whatever his name his?” I’d heard of Osama Bin Laden in passing, probably on 60 Minutes or some other news show. I knew he was responsible for embassy bombings and the like, but those were in Africa. The idea that he would ever orchestrate attacks on American soil had never occurred to me.
Adam nodded.“How many people are dead?”
“Dunno yet. Probably hundreds. Could be thousands.”
“Jesus. That's insane.”
“Yeah. Yeah it is. Well listen, I gotta go, but I'll see you.”
“Yeah man, see you.”
He leaves, and I find myself alone in the bathroom. It’s eerily quiet. I’m a little confused, a little angry, and honestly a little scared. Most of all, I have simply no idea what to do. I'm at a loss for all things: words, thoughts, comprehension.
So, I do what I usually do when I'm in a situation beyond my comprehension or control. I pray. I don't pray nearly as habitually as I probably should, or maybe would like, but it seems like an appropriate time to do so. I pray that whatever is happening isn’t the prelude to a massive global conflict, though somehow I know — even now — that it is. I never make it to the shower. I just go back to my room and sit at my desk.
I don’t personally know anyone in either New York or D.C., so I’m not worried about the immediate safety of a loved one. The closest thing I have is my girlfriend in College Park, Maryland. My first semi-coherent thought is to call her and make sure she’s alright. I’m not particularly worried — that is, until I try to make a call only to find that the phone lines are down. I’m eventually able to contact her via the internet, and she is, as I hoped, perfectly fine — though a little shaken, she says.
Having verified that my own microcosm of life is as intact as possible, I decide I should at least try to fulfill my scholastic responsibilities and attend my statistics class. On my way out, I pass a group of people huddled around the television in the lobby. News helicopters are circling the Twin Towers, which are now pouring smoke into an otherwise blemishless sky. I stop for a moment, shake my head incredulously, and continue to my class.
I sit down in the back of the lecture hall, and my professor begins the class by saying it would be permissible for people to leave their cell phones on, particularly if they were waiting to hear from someone. She remarks that her daughter was stranded in Paris due to the shutdown of air traffic.
After several anxious minutes of being unable to concentrate on anything, much less standard deviations, I leave class and return to the Myers Hall lobby. I join the group gathered around the television and we sit in stunned silence, staring at the screen in disbelief. No one says a word. One of the towers had collapsed while I was in class. The choppers continue to circle while the news anchors try to make sense of what’s going on.
Several minutes later, an audible and uniform gasp fills the room. The second tower crumbles to the ground on live television. There are no words to express the emotion, but we all feel it and know it’s mutual. None of us have ever seen anything like it.
I spend the rest of the day in a haze, with the occasional conversation that consists of little more than “Can you believe it? Me either.” Afternoon classes are canceled, and most people spend it in the dorm lobby. Something about national tragedies triggers a need in people to be around each other.
Later in the evening, the group congregates again in the lobby. On the television, the members of Congress gather on the steps of the Capitol building to make a statement which turns into an impromptu singing of “God Bless America.” I try not to let anyone see me cry.
Adam comes in and addresses the group: “Hey guys, if anyone is interested, we're doing a candlelight vigil out on the quad.” We all shuffle out of the door, where someone is handing out candles. We stand quietly on the quad, still no one is yet sure what to say. I look up into the clear night sky, and for the first time I can remember, there are no planes.
After 10 years had passed, I thought I’d grown up enough to write something else:
9/11 will never be just another day on the calendar for anyone in my generation or older. My generation has the regrettable distinction of having 9/11 be the first — and likely defining — major event of our adult lives. But I feel like I’ve reached a point where I can’t add anything useful to what has already been said about it. There’s a limit to the perspective of a college freshman who was a thousand miles away; and the older I get, the more crass it seems to repeatedly remember where I was or how I felt. Because regardless of where I was, I wasn’t in Manhattan, or in the Pentagon, or on a plane over Pennsylvania. And as upsetting as that day was, not once did I have to contemplate how my wife would raise our children without me, or make peace with the decision to bring down a plane so that no one else on the ground would have to die.
It will never be easy to watch the footage of the towers collapsing, or listen to the audio of the 911 calls. But — thankfully — each anniversary represents another year of healing. Another year removed from the raw, open wounds. Another year of rebuilding.
And another year of the realization that, in spite of the best efforts of evil men, life goes on. In spite of their efforts, we still got up this morning, many of us went to work in high-rise buildings — some that overlook everything those evil men despise — and many of us boarded planes. And even though my heart is heavier today, when I go home, I’m going to have a beer, I’m going to play with my dogs in our yard, and I’m going to watch baseball. Because, in spite of the best efforts of evil men, we’re not stricken by fear or grief. We mourn the loss of our countrymen, but we realize that the best way to honor their memory — and the most effective obscene gesture to the subhuman scum that perpetrated such evil — is to live our lives without fear.
I still stand by all of that — though I would replace “dogs” with “daughter” and “beer” with “wine,” but I’m still gonna watch baseball — but I’m sort of bummed because lately I don’t feel like we’re holding up our end of the deal. As tragic and as awful as 9/11 was, there was a palpable sense of national unity in its wake, at least for a while. But all of that is gone now, to the point that if an event like 9/11 happened today, I think it would make our common mental state worse, not better. I mean, just look at what COVID did. If we can’t even unite around defeating a fairly straightforward public health crisis, what hope do we have in coming together around fairly complex political and foreign policy issues?
I just don’t see how we get from here to there, and I worry it gets worse before it gets better.
Virgil, Quick Come See
On Wednesday, Donald Trump released a statement lamenting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from Richmond, Virginia; and, uh, went on to generally praise Robert E. Lee for just being a swell guy:
I’ll admit, I’ve lost all patience in recent years for Civil War revisionism. Growing up in Georgia, it was always sort of a touchy subject. And I get it — no one wants to admit to being on the losing side of a war, much less a war over something as insane as perpetuating human slavery. So we invent these little euphemisms and stories — the war wasn’t about slavery, it was about “states’ rights.” It wasn’t the civil war, it was “the War of Northern Aggression.” Robert E. Lee didn’t lead the Confederate Army because he believed in the cause, he led it because he just loved his home state of Virginia too damn much.
Just as a quick aside: I always though “the War of Northern Aggression” thing was a joke. But there’s a plaque on campus at the University of Georgia that earnestly refers to the Civil War that way — it’s from like the early 1900s, but still. Apparently people still believe that shit, which blows my mind.
Anyway, the thing about Robert E. Lee fighting for the Confederacy because he loved Virginia has always seemed weird to me. For one thing, it’s almost entirely bullshit. But even if you take it at face value, I mean, so what if he loved Virginia? He still took up arms against the United States, directed soldiers under his command to kill tens of thousands of Americans, and all to perpetuate the institution of race-based slavery. Screw that guy.
I think Virginia is a pretty swell place. I’ve worked here for more than a decade, I’ve put down roots, I’m raising my kids here. You don’t see me committing treason over it.
That’s what this all boils down to. Robert E. Lee was a traitor. He took up arms against the United States and killed a whole bunch of Americans because he wanted to maintain slavery. We should really stop euphemizing that.
And that’s what’s so infuriating about Donald Trump’s homage here. He doesn’t actually care about Robert E. Lee — and why would he? He’s a rich boy from Queens. But he’s convinced himself that his base of supporters are a bunch of rednecks who are nostalgic for the losing, pro-slavery side of the Civil War. And who are we to argue, y’know?
If people want to romanticize the Confederacy and its leaders, I suppose that’s their prerogative. But we shouldn’t pretend they’re romanticizing something other than what they actually are.
These Friggin’ People
I know I said on Wednesday that I’ve been deriving sadistic enjoyment from the Ohio Senate Republican primary, but even this might be too much:
This, of course, is in response to the new COVID mitigation policies that President Biden announced yesterday. (I’ll have more to say about that on Monday after I take some time to, y’know, actually read up on them. Contrary to what you might have thought, I don’t actually just talk out of my ass for this newsletter.)
What’s most shameful is that two of Mandel’s grandparents are apparently Holocaust survivors.
Comparisons between COVID mitigation efforts and the Holocaust are nothing new — they started pretty much immediately after the efforts themselves. But they’ve always really offended me, because as I’m fond of saying: if you think COVID mitigation efforts are similar to the Holocaust, I can introduce you to some people who experienced both and we can see what they say.
I’m not sure how literally true that is anymore, because most of the Holocaust survivors I know have since passed away. But my point remains. People should know better, especially people like Mandel.
But we’ve apparently reached a point in our political culture where some people are willing to cheapen and dishonor the unspeakable suffering of their own grandparents in order to score cheap political points.
It is just so, so gross.
And while it’s darkly funny that a try-hard like J.D. Vance is losing to this schmuck, there’s nothing funny at all about the fact that this Schmuck is likely to become a U.S. Senator.
Trient-Weekly Trivia
Wednesday’s answer:
Category: Computer Languages
Clue: Sharing a name with a type of large snake, this computer language is used in NASA’s integrated planning system.
Python
Today’s clue:
Category: Science
Clue: This American seismologist devised a scale for measuring earthquake intensity in the 1930s.
Dispatches from the Homefront
Had a bit of a “Who’s on First” routine going with my daughter on our way home from daycare yesterday. I looked back in the mirror to see her chewing on something, but I hadn’t given her anything edible.
“Kiddo, what’re you eating?”
“A puff.”
“…where’d you get that?”
“My mouth.”
“No, I know where it went, but where did you get it?”
“My mouth.”
“I know you put it in your mouth, but where did you get it?”
“…my mouth.”
We went on like this for longer than I care to admit.