"Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

[jack_babalon]

I was sitting in a cube just like this one. Same job, different desk. My supervisor came over to me and told me that the second tower had been attacked. I didn't say a word. I just sat there. We didn't have a TV set in the office and only a handful of us had any real internet access at the time, so all we had to go on was what we got from the radio. I didn't believe it. I mean I knew it was happening but a part of me couldn't believe it. Not my New York. You have to understand it just wasn't possilbe. As a kid I grew up believing New York City was invincible. That she was the wise older sister to her baby brother Brooklyn and sibling boroughs. I could still close my eyes and look up to see that slice of gray sky snaking between the canyons of office buildings as my Mother tugged me along the streets by my hand. Standing on the platform of the subway with my folks, waiting for the train and up ahead across the river of tracks was a veil of stars. The skyline of Manhattan glittering both proud and defiant. I remember that even up in Yonkers I could ride my bike along the Express way and turn around see the Twin Towers floating through a miasma of air pollution, standing like the gates to a dream that was always possible.

I tried to put together what it was I was hearing but just couldn't: The Chinese Whisper game of rumors, the impromptu prayer groups in the meeting room, the occasional spark of anger made ugly by an enemy still unknown, the muffled tears from behind a gray cube wall and huddling over the break room phone, each of us desperately trying to reach our families for any word from the outside world.

Already you could taste it on the air. A nauseous panic that permeated the very silence our words seemed to sink into. The fear had already become as tangible as a wall of fog, as the advancing march of a terrible storm cloud, as a wave gathering up like the strike of a hammer. It was the sobering moment of realization that we, as a people and as a nation, had not been spared by the attention of history. That our lives suddenly would emerge from and simoultaneously frame events too large for us to fully comprehend. For a moment the 'terrible giant' of the American people had awoke to discover that they were indeed a part of the world they lived in.

Five years later. The car windows are no longer adorned with little American flags in them. Osama Bin Laden still hasn't been captured and remains at large. More people will still vote for an 'American Idol' than they will for an American President. We are in the third year of war with Iraq, rather with the Middle East in Iraq. A war that has seen almost as many American casualties as there were suffered in the 9/11 attacks and yet fails to generate the same public discourse as say the Jonbenet Ramsey case.

"Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The philosopher George Santayana wrote almost fifty years ago. But I think he has it wrong. It isn't condemned, it's deserve.

Comments

It isn't condemned, it's deserve.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

You're damned right, you are.

[daucus-carota.livejournal.com]

09-11-06 was a vivid representation of what is wrong with this country. I believe that george dubbedya bush should be required to read, aloud, the names of the soldiers that have died (been murdered by the hand of their commander-in-cheif) on the individual anniversaries of their deaths... names that add up to the same number as the victims of 9-11. "I am afraid that our president will prove himself to be a cowboy with a tin badge"... a line from my journal entry right after 9-11. A fear that has materialized in our reality. Hmmm... what constitutes a terrorist?
xxx