a 9/11 post

In the seven years I lived in New York after September 11, 2001, I kind of got over 9/11 tributes. Many a September 11th passed without my feeling a particular need to memorialize, and I think plenty of New Yorkers felt the same. Not those who lost loved ones or suffered trauma, but the vast majority of us who were just there in the city on that surreal day of blue skies and ash-white smoke. We were around for the main event. Calling it up year after year seemed unnecessary.

But this seems to be the year that some people want to remember 9/11, and for very particular reasons. People who insist on a particular meaning for that event, slave graves and other inconvenient truths aside. And while I completely agree with the sentiment of this post--about the imperial arrogance of demanding that our tragedy be remembered above and to the exclusion of all others--I do remember. There are things from that day and the days that followed that I can recall with a visceral, snapshot clarity that hasn't faded after nine years and maybe never will.

On September 11, 2001, I was a 19-year-old sophomore at Columbia University. I was six miles away from the World Trade Center that morning, at the other end of Manhattan, but that was close enough. These are some of the things I will never forget:

Checking in with friends to make sure they are still alive.

Standing on the roof of my friend's building, watching the F-16s fly over Manhattan, with a Lebanese friend who casually remarks, "Huh. That's the first time I've seen those when they weren't going to bomb somewhere."

Eating a late dinner at JJ's Place a few days later, listening to some bigot-on-the-street scream hatred on CNN, and suddenly being engulfed in a physical, palpable wave of fear. Not fear of more terrorist attacks but fear of my own government, and what it might try to get away with under the shadow of racist hysteria.

The missing posters. The faces that stared up at you from subway stops and telephone poles, framed with the desperate pleading of loved ones, and the twisted connection they invoked to that other 9/11--also a clear blue Tuesday morning--a parallel so surreal it could only have happened in real life. The way people say missing when they can't yet bear to say dead.

That demonstration, that incredible night march through the streets of Manhattan ten days after 9/11, when we expected a hundred people and five thousand showed up. Chanting "No war, no attacks, bombs won't bring our loved ones back" as if the raw power of our grief could actually make those in power listen. Marching against war before we even knew where the war was going to be. The two-hundred-person antiwar organizing meeting held on the lawn outside Columbia's student center, when it seemed, for a historical split-second, that something other than slaughter might have been possible.

The moment at the end of that same night march, in Union Square, when the wind shifted, bringing with it the acrid smell of the still-burning rubble less than a mile away. "I left Sarajevo to get away from that smell," a woman standing near me said. At that moment we were just scared civilians in another bombed-out city.

And, most of all, the thing I thought about as we went out to get food after a long day of news-watching and check-ins to assure ourselves and others that yes, everyone we knew was still alive: Imagine living every day like this.

I know the terror and grief New Yorkers experienced for one day is minuscule compared to what our government has visited on other countries and on the people who were here before us. I am humble about our place in the world historic scale of destruction. But I think it is important not to forget those feelings, to hold on to them and to see in them the reflection of other bombed cities and shell-shocked survivors. I think they are useful when remembering whom to sympathize with and whom to fear, when remembering who is the us and who is the them.

Whenever someone shouts "Remember 9/11!" to justify war or Islamophobia or attacks on immigrants, I want to ask, "Do you?" Were you there? Because if you weren't, shut the hell up. And if you were, if you really remember the fear and vulnerability and pain that engulfed the city, how dare you wish that upon anybody else?