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On 9/11/2001, I was sitting at home. I had just been laid off from work the day before, Monday, 9/10. I had gotten a call, much too early in the morning, from my crazy friend Sam in Connecticut. "New York City is being destroyed!" he yelled at me. "Turn on your television!" It wasn't one of his paranoid delusions. It was obvious to me that I was not going to be looking for work that day. Like so many other people, I watched in horror, on and on, through the endless repetitions of the planes crashing, the towers falling.
In some sense, didn't the predictions of the jingoists happen, only in reverse? They said, "if you do not do what we want, the terrorists will have won." We've spent trillions of dollars on useless wars. My wife got invasively searched twice on a recent trip because of tiny amounts of metal in her clothing. The barriers protecting our privacy have been irrevocably shattered. The terrorists probably had a much more specific vision of the destruction of this country, one which I am grateful did not come to pass, but didn't they, in some sense, get what they wanted?
Sam died young, of lung cancer, two years ago this summer. The company I had worked for had bet the farm on an enormous project that was going to be installed in the World Trade Center the week of 9/11; they were sold. For reasons I don't fully understand, I'm still around. But the transformation of my country into something unrecognizable, which began with Reagan, got an enormous jumpstart on 9/11, and even now it continues without significant relief. I thought the election of Obama meant that I could be a patriot again; the legacy of 9/11 continues to dash that hope.
In some sense, didn't the predictions of the jingoists happen, only in reverse? They said, "if you do not do what we want, the terrorists will have won." We've spent trillions of dollars on useless wars. My wife got invasively searched twice on a recent trip because of tiny amounts of metal in her clothing. The barriers protecting our privacy have been irrevocably shattered. The terrorists probably had a much more specific vision of the destruction of this country, one which I am grateful did not come to pass, but didn't they, in some sense, get what they wanted?
Sam died young, of lung cancer, two years ago this summer. The company I had worked for had bet the farm on an enormous project that was going to be installed in the World Trade Center the week of 9/11; they were sold. For reasons I don't fully understand, I'm still around. But the transformation of my country into something unrecognizable, which began with Reagan, got an enormous jumpstart on 9/11, and even now it continues without significant relief. I thought the election of Obama meant that I could be a patriot again; the legacy of 9/11 continues to dash that hope.
