Well, since I’m up early for some inexplicable reason that I’m pretty sure has altered the very fabric of space and time, I may as well do all my somber musings and whatnot to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This feels a little self-important, since every major publication seems to have devoted an entire issue to remembrance/reflection… but it is *because* every major publication has devoted an issue to remembrance/reflection that I find myself thinking so much about it. Rather than go into pointless admissions that I’m not intellectually qualified to make about how far we’ve come in the past 10 years or what the attacks mean in terms of national identity and yadah yadah (you can get all of that from legit journalists and shite. I’m just here for me.), I’m just going to stream-of-consciousness some thoughts on 9/11 and my personal relationship to the attacks.
The Roommate is from Arlington, VA, so 9/11 for her is a vastly different and far crazier memory than it is for me. The Pentagon was hit in her very city. Insane. A west-coaster myself, I woke up groggily around 7:30-ish am PST to my mother telling me about the attacks and my dad chiding her, “don’t tell her that first thing in the morning.” We spent the whole day at school watching the news. It was surreal, since that very July the family had spent a week in New York, and as part of our touristy-whatever, had ventured to the top of one of the WTC towers.
The next couple of weeks were intense. I think pretty much everyone in my age bracket can agree that the connotations of certain national symbols were significantly altered for us by the American response in the following days. I have come to associate the American Flag, pervasive as it was in the aftermath of the attacks, with the events of 9/11 even when it is used in completely unrelated contexts. This came up in an art class I took last winter (and dropped because the professor sucked some seriously hairy man-tits). We were discussing something bullshitty or other and someone mentioned that a picture of the American Flag reminded them of war and 9/11. The prof dismissed the comment as irrelevant to the flag, but the rest of the class agreed that to us–so young at the time of the attacks–the image of the flag immediately recalled its likeness on car antennas and house windows while radios blasted Lee Greenwood.
But things eventually settled down and life went back to normal. I returned to obsessing about who asked who to the dance, and I got my first boyfriend and fell in cute geek puppy-love. We broke up, and I went through a goth phase to assert my individuality. I scared my mom with all the black I wore and screamo I listened to. I started caring more about school and studying my ass off like a grade-A nerd (which I was). I religiously watched the first 3 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy and marathoned all 7 seasons of Buffy in a three-day weekend with my sister. I smoked weed for the first time. I went to concerts. I fell in love, then out of it. The years kept passing and then it was prom dates and “what college are you going to?” I graduated high school and became obsessed with clothes and fancy beer and casual sex. 9/11 and the war were there, but they really didn’t change my life consciously on a day-to-day basis.
However, the events did change me intellectually. After 9/11 was when I first became a news junkie. I subscribed online to The New York Times and started reading every issue of TIME cover to cover. My initial response to the attacks, of course, was black-and-white, good-and-evil, innocent-and-guilty, just the way a child indoctrinated by the American public school system would react. I started reading the news because I wanted to know what was going to happen afterwards… our response, justice, etc. But what happened instead, was that I started learning about the utter web of insanity that is foreign policy and how no one is right or wrong or good or evil and so on and so forth. I became disillusioned in my image of a perfect government and American superiority. Through the years my news-gathering expanded to include progressive sources such as TPM, Alternative Radio, and Noam Chomsky’s various two cents.
I think being ethnic had a lot to do with the way the attacks did/didn’t affect me and my politics. My parents are immigrants, so while happy with America as their new home, they didn’t raise me to fist pump the air and yell “FUCK YES, ‘MERICA!” Also, growing up in the Bay Area, my experience has been rife with exposure to liberal outlooks and a plethora of minorities. Growing up in Fremont specifically, home to the largest Afghan-American population in the US, was crucial in shaping my view of the attacks and the subsequent war. It was difficult to see friends caught struggles between family in their mother-country and expectations from their new home. If America ever went to war with India, I wonder what I would think or do. (Probably flee to Canada, start screaming “ABOOOOT!” and have the maple leaf tattooed on both breasts). Every time we visited India, both pre and post attacks, my sister and I would have to defend ourselves as the Americans. Not necessarily politically, but culturally. Snide remarks from extended family of “I don’t know what kind of things you eat in America” or “I don’t know what they teach you in America” or “I don’t know what kinds of things American girls do” and bold admissions from our grandfather that all terrible Bollywood dancing is “damned American influence” would piss us off. Any time we spoke Kannada, our mother tongue, our cousins would laugh at our American accents. At the same time I found myself defending misconceptions of Indian culture and customs to Americans (who laugh at Indian accents). It’s very strange and stressful to be caught in that dichotomy, and I can’t imagine dealing with that in the context of war.
As a teenager I was militantly opinionated about a number of things, and the war was certainly one of them. I was on both sides of it at various times, and 100% sure that I was correct at the time no matter what I was thinking. Since then, I’ve come to be a chronic waffler. I think college, and the exposure it gave me to an even greater body of information and diversity (ne’er knew so many white people in my life), taught me that. Where I used to be a “Hell yes!” or “Hell no!” I’ve become a lot more of a “Hell maybe!” For everything I think I know, I now realize there’s a number of things I don’t know. (I once took an Epistemology class and have been forever ruined.) I think that’s my conclusion then, if there happens to be a conclusion lurking around somewhere beneath all of this. I confess I don’t think about 9/11 on a daily basis, nor do I have any strong opinions about what is right and what is wrong in relation to it. But I feel fairly confident that the desire for awareness and understanding that I and many of my peers have been cultivating since, comes as a direct result of the 9/11 attacks. I like to hope I would have started reading the news and trying to acquaint myself with what was going on regardless of whether or not 9/11 had happened, but I’m pretty sure my interest would have been passing, or affected for the sake of beating off intellectually. Have I come to believe from my search for awareness and understanding that all people are universally terrible and suck balls? Possibly. But I’m also willing to believe that people do what they do because they have their own brand of strange and stressful dichotomy.
I don’t know. Once thing is for certain though: now that I’ve mentioned waffling, I have an insurmountable craving for sugary breakfast food.
