This year it is nineteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks– almost a whole generation. The children who were babies and toddlers then, are just about old enough to start a family now.
I write about 9/11 every year, and I still don’t know how to do it justice.
Every year I watch the news footage of the attacks, trying to remind myself what it was like. Last year, 2019, was the first time it looked old. The camera footage looked fuzzy, the graphic sequences that opened the breaking news looked quaint, and the anchormen’s suits looked like somebody’s old clothes. It didn’t look like something I remembered from the recent past anymore. It looked like history.
My father used to describe to me how terrifying it was, in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He talked about how his parents hadn’t even liked Kennedy but they were shocked and frightened as well. School was called off. Everyone was afraid. His mother took the children to the Methodist church that Sunday and his father stayed home, as usual, but when they came back his father came running out of the building screaming “THEY SHOT OSWALD!” and and of course that news made everyone even more afraid and paranoid, in his and every household, a whole country awash in fear.
Once, my father showed me an old videotape he’d gotten from the library. The videotape was a series of clips from famous live breaking news in American history. He showed me Walter Cronkite sitting at that odd desk cluttered with rotary phones, in his button-down shirt and that ridiculous skinny necktie, taking his glasses on and off and blinking as he announced what had happened.
It looked fake.
It looked like somebody’s silly parody of what news coverage of an emergency might have looked like decades ago.
Then, my father showed me the footage of the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, and that looked even more fake. Police officers didn’t look like that when they escorted prisoners. Nobody would let a crowd of people get that close to a prisoner being transported. Nobody would respond that slowly to a gun that close up. People in the past couldn’t have been this slow and oafish. Surely that wasn’t real. Surely it was some kind of low-budget noir movie shot with a very bad camera, the 60s equivalent of Found Footage.
But it wasn’t. It was history.
That’s how 9/11 footage looks to me lately.
I told my daughter about how my father ran into the house– I was home by myself, and he’d been out with a client, witnessing a will. The client’s son had called him from the son’s home in Manhattan, and then my father had driven home. He burst in the door screaming “DID YOU HEAR THE NEWS?” looking, I assume, like his own father saying “THEY SHOT OSWALD!” And then we turned on the television.
I watched that same footage last night, and it looked fake.
Surely there was never a time when it was that easy to get on a plane. Of course they didn’t really think it was an accident in the first moments. It’s not possible that they told people to stay in the North Tower, instead of evacuating, for fear they’d be hit by debris from the South Tower. It’s not possible they didn’t expect that the terrorists would wait until a good crowd gathered near the Twin Towers before they crashed into the second building. That’s a trick so old it’s in a children’s book. We certainly didn’t respond to this crisis with a renewed xenophobia and then attack the wrong country. No one is that stupid. No one is that selfish. This cannot be real.
It has already been pointed out that we no longer live in a post-9/11 era. We did up until this year or a little earlier, but now we live in a different time. The post-9/11 era is in the past. The 9/11 terrorist attacks are something people look at with distance and confusion rather than trauma. We have a new trauma now.
The trauma doesn’t seem to have a nice, easy-to-remember name yet. It involves more than three solid years of government corruption so blatant and crass that it’s gotten boring to notice– I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard “this could become a constitutional crisis.” It also involves environmental destruction resulting in record-setting wildfires in at least two continents. It concerns a pandemic that kills a 9/11’s worth of people every three days in this country alone, spread through incompetence and breathtaking selfishness. It involves an historic uprising against racism and police violence, largely peaceful but egged on to violence and looting by many and responded to with grossly disproportionate violence by the police, and I expect the violence will get much worse.
I don’t know where this trauma will end, or how long its aftermath will be. But I know that someday, to whoever lives through it and to their children, it will look like history.
Someday, if I survive, it won’t be a trauma but a memory, of an alien time when men wore odd neckties and nothing looked quite real. My daughter will watch old footage on anniversaries and tell her children how scary it was, and her children will think it’s a bad noir movie. They will ask how anyone could be that foolish, and that self-centered. And then they will have their own traumas.
Nearly a whole generation has gone by, nearly two decades, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Things that were fashionable then are dated and old now. Things that were strange to us are common knowledge to our children. Old fears have become normal everyday cautions. Trauma has become history.
We are preoccupied with new dead now. The old dead are ghosts from a long time ago.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and to this whole past generation. May the dead find everlasting life in You, and may this new time somehow not end as badly as it’s begun.
Now we live in a new era.
The old one has become history.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.
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