{"id":13410,"date":"2020-09-10T20:07:16","date_gmt":"2020-09-11T00:07:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/?p=13410"},"modified":"2020-09-10T20:31:11","modified_gmt":"2020-09-11T00:31:11","slug":"requiem-for-an-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2020\/09\/requiem-for-an-era\/","title":{"rendered":"Requiem for an Era"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

This year it is nineteen years since the 9\/11 terrorist attacks\u2013 almost a whole generation. The children who were babies and toddlers then, are just about old enough to start a family now.<\/p>\n

I write about 9\/11 every<\/a> year,<\/a> and I still don\u2019t know how to do it justice.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s suits looked like somebody\u2019s old clothes. It didn\u2019t look like something I remembered from the recent past anymore. It looked like history.<\/p>\n

My father used to describe to me how terrifying it was, in the aftermath of John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination. He talked about how his parents hadn\u2019t 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 \u201cTHEY SHOT OSWALD!\u201d and and of course that news made everyone even more afraid and paranoid, in his and every household, a whole country awash in fear.<\/p>\n

Once, my father showed me an old videotape he\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

It looked fake.<\/p>\n

It looked like somebody\u2019s silly parody of what news coverage of an emergency might have looked like decades ago.<\/p>\n

Then, my father showed me the footage of the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, and that looked even more fake. Police officers didn\u2019t look like that when they escorted prisoners.\u00a0Nobody 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\u2019t have been this slow and oafish. Surely that wasn\u2019t real. Surely it was some kind of low-budget noir movie shot with a very bad camera, the 60s equivalent of Found Footage.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t. It was history.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how 9\/11 footage looks to me lately.<\/p>\n

I told my daughter about how my father ran into the house\u2013 I was home by myself, and he\u2019d been out with a client, witnessing a will. The client\u2019s son had called him from the son\u2019s home in Manhattan, and then my father had driven home. He burst in the door screaming \u201cDID YOU HEAR THE NEWS?\u201d looking, I assume, like his own father saying \u201cTHEY SHOT OSWALD!\u201d And then we turned on the television.<\/p>\n

I watched that same footage last night, and it looked fake.<\/p>\n

Surely there was never a time when it was that easy to get on a plane. Of course they didn\u2019t really think it was an accident in the first moments. It\u2019s not possible that they told people to stay in the North Tower, instead of evacuating, for fear they\u2019d be hit by debris from the South Tower. It\u2019s not possible they didn\u2019t expect that the terrorists would wait until a good crowd gathered near the Twin Towers before they crashed into the second building. That\u2019s a trick so old it\u2019s in a children\u2019s book<\/a>. We certainly didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

It has already been pointed out that we no longer live in a post-9\/11 era<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The trauma doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s gotten boring to notice\u2013 I can\u2019t even count the number of times I\u2019ve heard \u201cthis could become a constitutional crisis.\u201d It also involves environmental destruction resulting in record-setting wildfires in at least two continents. It concerns a pandemic that kills a 9\/11\u2019s 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Someday, if I survive, it won\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We are preoccupied with new dead now. The old dead are ghosts from a long time ago.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s begun.<\/p>\n

Now we live in a new era.<\/p>\n

The old one has become history.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p>\n

Mary Pezzulo is the\u00a0author of\u00a0Meditations on the Way of the Cross<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our\u00a0donate page.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year it is nineteen years since the 9\/11 terrorist attacks\u2013 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\u2019t know how to do it justice. Every year I watch the news […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2694,"featured_media":1177,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1738,1988,5192,5953,665,1739,756,284],"tags":[1395,13,11151,12044,164,9630,145,12041,12047,1402,349,12035,373,257,12038],"class_list":["post-13410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-america","category-conspiracy-theory","category-culture","category-environment","category-fear","category-history","category-mystery","category-news","tag-1395","tag-children","tag-covid-19","tag-era","tag-fear","tag-generation","tag-history","tag-kennedy-assassination","tag-lee-harvey-oswald","tag-memory","tag-race","tag-race-riots","tag-terrorist-attack","tag-trauma","tag-uprising"],"yoast_head":"\nRequiem for an Era<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This year it is nineteen years since the 9\/11 terrorist attacks-- almost a whole generation. 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