Yesterday was the first real day of football, but the moment was not as joyous as it should have been. Looming just days ahead is the ten year mark of 9/11, the single most destructive yet defining moment for our generation. The costs have been high and the consequences calamitous, but we have nothing to show except a few piles of rubble that we never got around to cleaning up; industrial reminders of what we lost so long ago.
We had terrible fears stemming from that day. We believed that the end times were upon us. We huddled in our houses, too afraid to open the blinds. We believed the worst was yet to come, and we were certain that it would never be safe to travel again. All that we knew for certain was that the towers were gone, reduced to blood and burning steel that never really went away. We, as a nation, did not believe that we could pick ourselves up.
But time went on, as it always does, and eventually those crushing fears turned into massive hopes. Hopes of unity within our country. Hopes that our strength would send a message to all evil doers around the globe. Hopes that, in time, the world would become safe again.
Perhaps we were naïve in both our fears and hopes. Slowly we began to get back on airplanes and fly to all corners of the globe. Likewise, our dreams of unity began to fade. We all adopted a business as usual attitude for 364 days out of the year, the lone exception always being the anniversary of the day the towers fell.
Ten years is a long time. In that time, we have successfully started two wars that seem to have no end in sight and a bill that has become increasingly harder to ignore; we have helped dispose of a handful of Middle Eastern dictators that we said was in the name of democracy; we have seen the genocide rage in Darfur and we have turned a blind eye. We have seen sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives sent to die in the desert for wars they didn’t ask for and didn’t quite understand. What have we learned in that lost decade?
We learned that nothing has changed. More attack attempts came: an underwear bomber, a car filled with explosives left in Times Square, but we moved on because no one was hurt and failures are often easy to forget. Our politicians have brought us down into a hellish reality that we may never escape from; a world of two vindictive ideologies that will not rest until the other is destroyed for no good reason at all. We are impatient again. We are just as prejudiced as before, maybe even more so, and we still have no problem killing each other.
All that we have to show is a largely unplaced hatred for anyone farther west than France. We have an ungrounded suspicion that all Muslims are up to something so sinister that they deserve to be sent to Guantanamo right now, no questions asked. We cannot go to the airport without random security checks and TSA pat downs. Throughout this decade in despair, we have not changed for the better. We watch TV, go on Facebook and order takeout to forget that we ever lost anything. Somebody else would eventually come along and start the long process of sweeping up debris.
Eventually, even the rubble that was the towers and our loved ones became garbage, and had to be hauled out of sight and buried.
Osama bin Laden is gone, and so are ten long years. But we are no different than we were on September 10, 2001. We are the same consumers who don’t look at price tags before we put something in our shopping carts. We are the same people who blame one president and exonerate another. We are the same people who demand blood for blood. We are still the same Americans.
Maybe in another decade we will be able to fully absorb and understand what 9/11 meant. Or maybe we won’t. If that’s the case, at least we can adequately distract ourselves.
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