It hadn’t actually occurred to me to post anything about the 10th anniversary of 9/11 until I received an email from Tenured Radical yesterday asking that I let her know if I posted anything. I told my 9/11 story, such as it is, on the fifth anniversary, and that story hasn’t changed. I’ve avoided all news coverage for the past few days: I feel like there’s something macabre, when my experience of that event was entirely mediated by media coverage, about returning to the media. What do I mean by that? Well, I, like the vast majority of us, did not experience the events of September 11th first-hand: I watched them unfold on television. Watching television now feels less like commemoration or memorial to me and more like an attempt to re-experience, a gross nostalgia. My experience of 9/11 was, in every way that matters, vicarious. It didn’t actually happen to me, any more than Hurricane Katrina happened to me.
Now, you might say, “But we all as Americans experienced this! It happened to us all!” and I suppose that is “true,” as far as it goes. But I feel very distant from the events of September 11, 2001, in a way that I don’t feel distant from the day-to-day reality of my students who are veterans who’ve returned from active duty in Afghanistan or Iraq, of my students who have family, friends, or partners currently serving or just returned home. I feel very distant from the events of September 11, 2001, in a way that I don’t feel distant from the shock of the collapse in the housing market and the double-dip recession which leaves us with a 9.1 percent unemployment rate nationally.
This is not to diminish the tragedy of that day for those who experienced its events first-hand, who lost their lives, who lost family members. Rather, it’s to honor them in the acknowledgment that their loss is not my property, their loss is not something that I have any right to consume.
I left the US just a couple of weeks after 9/11 to pursue my post-graduate studies in London. Having spent most of the last decade outside the US I have noticed that in many, many ways, life has gotten worse for a very large number of Americans since that time. I am not exactly sure how it all went so wrong, but there certainly has been a lot of wasted opportunity.
Thank you for writing this. I was there, and I don’t particularly like talking about it. I get very upset by the media circus and all the “remembering” by people who weren’t there. Your post is the first thing I have ever seen that made me feel a little better.
Exactly. I feel very distant from the events of 9/11, too, and don’t want to pontificate on them and encroach on the rights and feelings of people who were there and for whom it does have immediate and tragic meaning. Watching it on TV was awful, but nothing like actually experiencing it, and doesn’t give me any right to say anything meta about the event.
Also, I fully respect those who did experience it for whom the commemoration is meaningful, and would never say they shouldn’t be allowed to remember and grieve. But my own feeling is that our country took a lot of wrong turns after 9/11 and that for a lot of people who didn’t experience 9/11 the event became a trigger for the nastiest kind of jingoism, and I really don’t want to take part in that kind of commemoration. At all. It all feels ghoulish to me.
[…] Update: reflection from Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time, with a link to her fifth anniversary post; Michelle Moravec at History in the City (who is also in […]
Your respectful attitude is much appreciated. The self-congratulatory glurge all over the fucken place–and almost all of it promulgated by people who were nowhere near the events of the day–makes me fucken sicke.
Thank you for this. I’ve been avoiding the media too. What I remember about 9/11 is that for a very few days, the news felt like *the news*, without spin (which seemed like a very novel thing to me). That spinlessness — that the anchors seemed as shocked and emotional as the rest of us — wore off after a couple of days, and then I had to stop watching the news again. But I remember how much I appreciated that for once the media itself was too shocked to tell us what we were supposed to think and feel.
“But I feel very distant from the events of September 11, 2001, in a way that I don’t feel distant from the day-to-day reality of my students who are veterans who’ve returned from active duty in Afghanistan or Iraq, of my students who have family, friends, or partners currently serving or just returned home. I feel very distant from the events of September 11, 2001, in a way that I don’t feel distant from the shock of the collapse in the housing market and the double-dip recession which leaves us with a 9.1 percent unemployment rate nationally”
I am not American nor was I living in the country at the time. I understand what you are saying, but I can’t separate the events of 9/11 from the wounded soldiers or the economic debacle. I was reminded of the consequences of 9/11 constantly as a grad student, since every time I logged into a university’s computer, I had to click that I understood that my browsing could be monitored and my activities reported to whatever security agency (I went to a State University, I don’t know if it was the same at other universities). Thanks Patriotic Act.
What I usually try to do to people who talk about 9/11 as an exceptional and unique event (which it was in a sense), was that it had consequences that you feel until today. The US went to war and lowered taxes (although in my personal opinion, Bush would have gone to war anyway, regardless of a terrorist attack). What impact did this have in the current economic situation, I ask those people. I agree with you about feeling distant from the events as it is treated by the media, but I don’t feel the distance when I consider the consequences.
YES!
Thanks for this post Dr Crazy. I feel much the same way about it. I think some people use the event to garner unnecessary sympathy in a way that makes them “unique” just because they happened to live nearby, or know someone who knows someone. But then, there are plenty of legit experiences too.
Spanish Prof- I get what you are saying but saying 9/11 is when the country “got worse” seems as overly political to me as neo-cons using it as a justification for wars and increases security. It was just an event. It may have given Bush more clout but as seen by current politics one does not need a catalyst to hold the country hostage. I think the tendency for liberals (and I say this as one) to consider the day as a precursor to two wars, poor tax decisions, violations of civil rights, really does a disservice to what actually happened that day and just accepting it as its own thing.
Frau Tech: no, I don’t think that it was when the country “got worse” at all, but I don’t see it as an isolated event either. I think seeing it as an isolated event is dangerous, since it becomes a myth: “evil terrorist who came and destroyed our peace”. Now, to be clear, I think that those who did it are evil terrorist. Maybe it wasn’t clear in my first post, but what I advocate for is to place the event in history, and to see the before and after. I think there were reasons why this happened, and that the aftermath can be felt today. By the way, just to be clear, I am not saying like some have said that America deserved it. There were two terrorist attacks in Argentina, my home country, in the 1990s, and no country deserves to be a victim of it.
If you ask me personally, I think Bush would have initiated a war anyway. But that’s my personal opinion, and it’s not the point of Dr. Crazy’s post. And regardless, counter-factual history is not something that I like anyway.