Sept 11, Then and Today

I wanted to write a post on 9/11, but was down at Duke teaching all day and didn't have a chance.

So here, belatedly, are some of my thoughts...

As someone who lived in NYC for over 13 years and was still living there in 2001, I'll always remember 9/11 very viscerally. I was lucky enough to be out of town that day, and returned two days later to my apartment in Brooklyn , which was across the water from the world trade center. Walking in, I discovered I had left the windows in my top floor apartment open and everything I owned was covered in a layer of yellow/gray powder. It looked like what you'd find in an urn. Needless to say, I did a thorough cleaning. Now my nest was back to normal. But the problem persisted whenever I went outside. There were flyers on people's doors about people missing, candles lit everywhere in memoriam for dead loved ones, and a hugely increased police presence in my Italian American neighborhood, which bordered a neighborhood full of fabulous Middle Eastern food shops. All of a sudden, those shop owners and their families were being viewed with suspicion. The police kept going up and down the streets, and one shop owner closed his shop after being threatened by some overzealous Americans. Overnight, I was living in a funereal police state. It was unreal. About that time, I met Mike and we both agreed, me quite readily, that we did not see living in NYC as the path for our future. I wanted out, and fast. I was also becoming very impatient to start the family life I knew I wanted and truthfully, NYC was not the place to do it for me. So, 9/11 was not the reason, but was a good catalyst for a lot of really critical personal decisions in my life. I didn't want to wait for the next emergency. I wanted to start living the life I wanted, and now.

Fast forward 7 years and here I am, living as far from multi-ethnic Brooklyn as I could possibly be, with an adoring husband, two beautiful children, in a place where I can leave home without locking the door and know that nothing will happen. Lulled into a false sense of security? Actually, I think not. I've been to NYC and San Francisco and Washington, DC and many other places since 2001, have probably taken over 100 airplanes and ridden over 500 subways since then, and I have to say, the world seems pretty safe right now to me. The first month in NY every time a plane was heard over your head, everyone on the street looked up apprehensively, but that no longer happens. I know we have a lot of people working on terrorism that help make that so, but I also know how easy it is to harm people on the subway, on any day, at any time, and the fact that this has not happened, NOT EVEN ONCE, since 9/11 gives me pause. I think we are MUCH MUCH more terrorized by the notion of people hating us than we are in danger of experiencing their hate first hand.

Cynically, I think it has been good government policy for the last 7 years to keep the fear level up, to help legitimize decisions that were made for other reasons. And then optimistically, I think we should all feel a great that 9/11 was seven whole years ago and nothing like it has happened since on American soil. I can tell you my friends who made it out of smoke-filled buildings in downtown Manhattan on that day to discover they couldn't see their hands in front of their faces would never have believed it would turn out this way. I didn't either.

But it has. Perhaps all we have to fear is fear itself. I do hope so.