Sept. 11:
2001-2011
When they
don’t want to defend the people they put them in uniforms and start defending
the country.
— Samuli Paronen
There is
no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.
— Sun Tzu
In war the
result is never final.
— Clause von Clausewitz
Am I still dreaming?
Two weeks ago, I told a friend/coworker that I sometimes
fear going to sleep because during my slumber I may slip into a parallel world
that is at once familiar yet fundamentally different from the day before. It
would be no different than if I were living in a dream.
----------
This is my freshman year at Oberlin College. Last week, I
had finished an exhausting and exasperating orientation with my dad: setting up
a local bank account, buying textbooks amid the throng of Obies new and old,
checking out the local restaurants and my new co-op, settling into my dorm room
from the nearby Motel 6. I am the only person from my high school who is
attending Oberlin. I am sharing a room again, albeit with a stranger from California
instead of my brother. That Monday was a long day for me 10 years ago, one that
began with 8 a.m. calculus and ended with dinner at the co-op. All of this
newness took its toll on me and I sleep Monday night as I had little to worry
about the next day since my first class didn’t begin until early afternoon.
I wake up about a quarter to 11 and the first thing I hear
is two people outside my window talking about the attack on the World Trade
Center towers. I didn’t think much of it since the north tower had been bombed
before in 1993, and they were probably talking about it within an international
political context, as many Obies, I would later find out, are wont to do.
Groggy, I go back to bed.
Around 11:30, I wake up, brush my teeth, wash my face,
change my clothes, and leave for lunch. I walk through the student union and
see my classmates huddled around TVs, watching footage that wouldn’t be out of
place in an action film. The World Trade Center had been completely destroyed
by airplanes. Two other flights had been hijacked: one crashed into the
Pentagon, the other into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania instead of
Washington, D.C. Le Monde runs the
headline, “We Are All Americans.” This is not a dream.
Classes are canceled. I receive emails and see posters about
impromptu teach-ins on Middle East politics and U.S. foreign policy. Classmates
make calls to friends and family with questions and reassurances and concerns.
I barely know anybody on campus and I don’t know anyone who is from New York,
so I watch TV, refresh the news websites, and listen to conversations. It seems
everyone went to the local Red Cross to give blood, so much so that the staff
had to turn away would-be donors. It is the only act many of us could take
while in the middle of rural Ohio. Come early Friday morning at my first real
job as copy editor for The Oberlin Review,
I would edit an article about this incident and see my RA featured in the
accompanying photograph. I watch clips of the plane crashing into the second tower
on TV and news websites. They eventually meld into one infinite mental loop of
disbelief. This is not a dream.
----------
Or is it? In the following months, I become a glutton for
information. I read about and watch Bush talk about al-Qaeda being responsible
for the attacks in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It is not until just
before the 2004 presidential election that al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden,
would claim responsibility for September 11. But none of us knew that that
would happen at the time.
----------
News outlets talk about the U.S. invasion into Afghanistan
to conduct its hunt for the terrorists responsible for the heinous attacks and
for those who supported them. I learn about the Taliban and its stranglehold on
the country and about the irreplaceable and historic Buddhist statues that they
have denounced and destroyed. I copyedit Review articles about student-led
protests against the war. The editors comment on the friends and classmates who
have been interviewed and photographed. In between consultations with the style
guide and the copy chief, I occasionally wonder why I’m in a crumbling,
overheated bomb and tornado shelter that had been converted into a dorm
basement, putting together a print newspaper, instead of joining the protests
or forming an activist group or signing up to an NGO. During the quiet moments,
I sometimes see the editors pause over the words and photographs, as if they
are asking themselves the same question. Then they continue with their work and
so do I. We have a noon deadline to meet.
----------
Two weeks before my 19th birthday, the U.S. and Britain
begin bombing Taliban forces in Afghanistan, thus starting a war that would
continue to this day. Two days after my birthday, House Representative Frank James
Sensenbrenner Jr (R-Wisconsin) introduces the USA PATRIOT Act. The acronym
stands for “Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate
Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism.” Five days after my
birthday, Bush signs the act into law. In the days before and after its passage
on both the House and Senate floors, many senators and representatives from
both parties protest that they did not have enough time to review the bill’s
340 pages.
Among the powers granted to the government in the bill: the elimination
of warrants for wiretaps and confiscation of communiqués from anyone suspected
of aiding or being a member of a terrorist organization; warrantless searches
of an individual’s home; the absence of probable cause when using a National
Search Letter, a form of government request for information and paperwork
related to any individual, and which includes a gag order forbidding the
targeted individual from knowing about the NSL.
A 2007 internal FBI audit finds that the agency violated its
use of NSLs more than 1,000 times since 2002. The audit’s sampling covers only
10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations.
----------
The first 20 detainees arrive at the Guantanamo Bay
Detention Camp that following January. It is five days before my sister’s 18th
birthday. I spend my winter term volunteering at the hospital down the street
from my high school. GTMO, as abbreviated by the military, remains open and
holds 171 detainees as of May 2011. Among those detained since the
establishment of “Gitmo” were children as young as 13 years old.
----------
“The War on Terrorism.” “The Axis of Evil.” “Weapons of Mass
Destruction.” The next target is Iraq. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell
gives a presentation to the U.N. about mobile biological weapons labs and the
sale of yellowcake uranium in Iraq. The U.S. and its allies begin bombing Iraq
on March 19, 2003. The target is Dora Farms where, according to military reports,
Hussein is visiting his sons Uday and Qusay. One civilian is killed and 14
others are injured, including nine women and a child. No Iraqi leaders were present.
Hussein has not visited the farms since 1995.
I read reports of Iraqi antiquities being looted by Iraqis
and U.S. and allied forces. I see an image circulating online supposedly of a
U.S. soldier using a crowbar to pry a gold plate off a door of an Iraqi palace.
News shows and websites present images of a statue of Saddam Hussein being torn
down. In addition to philosophy, I study Chinese and Japanese culture, history,
and art.
----------
Bush, wearing a flight suit, declares the war in Iraq to be
finished onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Nobel Prize-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes write a book in which they conservatively
estimate that the Iraq war has cost the U.S. $3 trillion. Their book, titled
“The Three Trillion Dollar War,” is released in February 2008. As of August
2011, the U.S. Treasury estimates the national debt to be $14 trillion.
----------
For a brief period, the U.S. had the world’s goodwill. Bush and
the rest of his administration squander it, hastily and nastily.
----------
Over the years, I try to imagine what the world would be
like if, instead of telling Americans to work — and spend — as they did before
the dot-com crash, Bush had asked everyone to donate their time and skills and fortune
toward those who cannot meet their basic needs, who live in unfortunate
circumstances not of their own making. Would we have avoided the wake of luxury
SUVs, sub-prime mortgages, “toxic assets,” bank bailouts, and home foreclosures
that marred the past half-decade and continue to plague us to this day?
----------
One month before my birthday, I wake up and wonder if I have
slipped into another dream. I am studying nutrition, trying to become a
registered dietitian. I am trying to help strangers, friends, and family
through food and nutrition education. I am working at another student-run
newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat,
as an avocation while my colleagues and friends work there as a stepping stone
toward a vocation that, depending on your point of view, is either going
through its death throes or just a painful metamorphosis. Aside from the
precocious, many of them did not fully grasp the enormity of September 11, 2001
at the time. But they have been learning of and living through that event’s
aftermath.
----------
It becomes increasingly difficult to follow the news as I
once did, mainly because my old habits and newsfeeds left me with many
sleepless nights, but also because there is too much information and white
noise and not enough curation and analysis and context. Trusted sources seem
scarcer. I lose track of many of my friends’ personal lives and vice versa. I
try to make up for it online.
I read, watch, and listen to the remembrances and
commemorations in the days leading to the 10th anniversary. I never paid much
attention to them in previous years because it somehow felt exploitative and
because I was not ready to remember that day.
----------
I am learning more about my limitations. I am learning to
find a space I can call my own. I am relearning not just what it means to be an
American at a time when America is unsure of itself and fearful of the
uncertain future, but also what it means to be human and humane.
----------
I tell myself: The tragedies of September 11, 2001 happened.
Our follies and missteps since that day stay with us. We are haunted by the
past and exorcised by the creation of a present inspired by visions of a better
future. This is not a dream.
----------
To hold a
pen is to be at war.
— Voltaire
The only
end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life or better to
endure it.
— Samuel Butler (1709-84)
Never
despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
— Edmund Burke
Do what
you can, with what you have, where you are.
— Theodore Roosevelt
For
myself, I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
— Winston Churchill
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