Nine years after 9-11, and on what, according to the New York Times is the most inharmonious commemoration in the near-decade since, I had to take a moment out of a very busy weekend to give space to my own thoughts on the anniversary.
I was a witness to the event, watching down Fifth Avenue as in a walking dream from the relative safety of midtown on a clear, crisp day as the towers burned and fell. I spent the day with co-workers trying to make sense out the events, listening as the scrambled jets flew over my city, trying with some difficulty to contact my children in New Jersey and family members around the country. I slept in my office floor that night when the subway back to Brooklyn was suspended.
There's nothing special in that. I did not lose anyone close to me, as two colleagues did. I wrote long descriptions of what I was seeing in the city in the days that followed in emails to my family. Unfortunately, I no longer have these. One too many crashed computers and email provider changes means I no longer have access to those words written in the first week following the attacks, and I foolishly never printed anything to maintain a hardcopy record.
I remember writing those thoughts so I would always have a record of how I felt at the time. Maybe it's best I don't have that record. The world has changed so much since then as have my own feelings about our nation's followup to the tragedy as that response has become increasingly irrational.
I took a job a few years after 9-11 that meant that, for the past four years, I have come to work each week day though the "basement, " "the bath tub", or the footprint of the two absent towers at the World Trade Center terminus for the PATH train from Hoboken. It's always been the most depressing part of the day, coming up from the cobbled-together station and herded into a narrow river of humanity onto Vesey Street, past the gawkers and the tourists with their camera phones blocking the commuters' path to work, taking photos to show their friends and family that they were at the site of 3000 murders. It probably will not bother me as much as time intervenes and a proper memorial takes shapes. No more than it should people taking pictures of that other graveyard a block away, the 250 year-old churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel.
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| St Paul's Chapel survived the fall of the Twin Towers across Church Street |
If the loved ones of the 3000 people who died that day find it comforting to have their names read out loud every 9/11, so be it. I have not lost a loved one in this fashion, so I can't imagine the open wound it must be for some as this day rolls around. Eventually even this will diminish as 9/11 becomes another Antietam, or Pearl Harbor. But we have years before that happens.
I am sorry to see the circus that has steadily grown up around the commemoration: usually people with an axe to grind one way or the other and various crackpots expressing the kind of conspiracy theories that makes the internet such a funhouse to visit. This year, as reported ad nauseum, there have been protests about the planned mosque and community center (hereafter simply "mosque") two blocks away. And somehow, due to a very small man with an even smaller mind in Florida, the pastor of a dying congregation, this day has also become linked with the potential burnings of copies of the Koran (henceforth simply "Korans") to express his righteous anger against.. what?
No doubt his ego is boosted by the personal phone call from General Petraeus and the mention given to him by the President and Secretary of State. And the BBC and NPR have been no less willing to spread his influence than CNN and FOX.
For what it's worth I can see many sides of these stories. I don't like the mosque too close to the site but it isn't on the site--so it's not a triumphal structure as many would claim though now, as blown out of proportion by the press, it has the aspect of becoming a trophy building representing a victory or defeat for someone. I can see how someone grieving over the loss of a loved one, including a Muslim loved one, might feel a sense of moral primacy in their view of the site. I don't care one whit what Glenn Beck or Newt Gingrich think about it.
Estimates of Muslims killed in the twin towers range from 23 to a patently foolish 1200. That's the range that pops up in various, usually self-serving stories found in a Google search. It's interesting none of the right-wing or outright hate sites try to claim zero Muslim casualties. Probably because there are upwards of 30 victims, like Shabbir Ahmed, who worked in the Windows on the World Restaurant, and Mohammed Salman Hamdani, a NYPD cadet, that are definitively identified.
Two blocks may not seem like a long distance to people who have never visited lower Manhattan but people should be aware that within the same distance to the future memorial there are churches, cheap junk shops, barber shops, convenience stores, one of the best electronics and computer stores in the northeast, skin shops, several fast food joints, a hotel and an off-track betting facility. It's not like this section of Manhattan has any standardly accepted use that makes any new structure incongruous. I'm frankly surprised a house of worship would want some of the neighbors it will likely find down there. But in real-estate starved Manhattan, unusual block-fellows are the norm. It's probably odd for someone living in, say, Alaska, to understand that people of completely different faiths and backgrounds often live across the hall from each other, but that's what many Manhattanites do. As was pointed out by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, recently, it's an odd thing that the closer one lives to "Ground Zero" the less problem one has with the mosque--while the opposite formula is just as vehemently true. It's not that all New Yorkers are obsessively policially correct (though many are). It's because high-density living in a multicultural environment forces tolerance, if not necessarily acceptance, as a matter of survival.
Large yards surrounded by other large yards owned by people who are just like you fosters a "get the hell off my lawn" worldview. Yes, that's a generalization, but there are too many cartoon politicians and protestors out there feeding the stereotype.
The coming political season is why I am so troubled by the way "the Islamic threat" is both blown out of proportion and soft-pedaled by people from the left and the right for purposes more cynical than sensible. I have no issue with the proposed siting of the mosque and lots of trouble with the burning of Korans because they are books, and any burning of books is a desecration in my mind and a time-tested practice of real fascists.
I do wonder, as a sometime bookseller, how many Korans were purchased, who published them, and were they in Arabic or one of the many fine English translations (which, according to a believer, would mean they were not the Koran, anyway) and hope some smart special sales person at a publisher or small bookstore got the sale, rather than Amazon. Similarly, though I am personally offended by the burning of the American flag, I often wish I had the overseas distribution concession for the stars & stripes assuming that flag-burners, world-wide, are not knitting these for conflagration, themselves.
These kinds of acts, putting a mosque near the site of a terrorist attack despite the legitimate concerns of mourners, burning Old Glory while veterans look on, flying a Confederate flag in a African-American neighborhood, burning books of any genre, or wearing a purple number 4 jersey in Wisconsin, are things I wish people wouldn't do, because they are hurtful to others and they do little to advance debate or understanding. But the only offense worse than building the mosque in downtown NYC or burning copies of the Muslim holy book would be for an American official to try to legally prohibit it. We should condemn the action, as Obama has, in the latter case, although I wish he had quickly dismissed it as the act of a loon. But if that loon wants to do something that will offend millions of his fellow travelers on this earth I recognize his right to do so.
The fact that so few people, even in Western Europe where, to use Germany as an example, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust (thus criminalizing stupidity) understand what Freedom of Speech (my caps) really means, illustrates one of the differences that I think separates the US at its core from the rest of the world. Our Supreme Court upheld the neo-Nazis right to march through the predominantly Jewish community of Skokie, Il. It was a hateful and provocative act (after the ACLU won the case on their behalf the group actually marched in near-bye venues but not in Skokie) but the court decision took the position that freedom of expression must be absolute. Individual conscience and a sense of civility (arguably both on their way out along with 2-D movies) are the only self-governing restrictions on this right.
But what about safety? Unlike Skokie, in the case of the Florida pastor, we are not talking about an outside group staging an act to offend the sensibilities of locals but a small, local, inside group threatening to stage an event to offend anyone who wants to take notice. In the internet and mass media world is the Koran burning a case of shouting "fire" in a very large and crowded theater?
There will likely be blood spilled because of this very clueless man down South, because the new media insures that every act, however locally mounted, is globally staged. The fact that he postponed the bonfire doesn't matter now that the Pandora's mix of fanaticism and outrage has been released. He may have to start looking over his shoulder for the next few years of his life because, while the majority of the world's Muslims will frown and despair with the rest of us that such a man can do such a stupidly miscalculated thing, of the millions of believers in the world there are likely a few who could be pushed into taking their own action.
But it was the Reverend Pastor Clueless who put his book burning plans on Facebook.
Congratulations. We are all connected.
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