What I'll Never Forget
The 20th anniversary of 9/11. So many takes, so little time.
It’s (one day after) the 20th anniversary of 9/11. On the day, I was watching the news in 8th grade of yet another brand new school in my dad’s endless “get a new job and move” saga when it happened; I’d never been to New York City and wasn’t sure what or where the “twin towers” were. Was it the Empire State Building? No. They were buildings that I had seen featured on Home Alone 2.
Tragedy set in as I really began to understand how serious things were — despite my ignorance of NYC buildings, I was already an avid newsreader and media junkie, and established firmly in my parents’ patriotic, pro-life, American Christian-style conservatism. We were all big GWB fans and I’d actually attended his inauguration several months prior, since I have a relative who lived and worked in D.C. and still does. I got pretty quickly that whatever was happening was A Big Deal but even then, I didn’t think we’d still be reeling from the effects of it all two decades later. I knew that lots of people were dead, and I cried all day.
As an anti-imperialist communist who despises much of what are considered “American values” these days, it’s always interesting to approach my feelings about this from a new angle. For years, I listened to Toby Keith songs, preached about American unity, indulged in gross amounts of Islamophobia, supported wars and soldiers and Republicans, and used the aftermath of 9/11 to define my conservativism and my patriotism without exploring too deeply what it actually meant. Even though I was the only Republican among my friends by time I was in high school, and I wasn’t living quite a totally innocent Christian lifestyle, I held firm to my beliefs and was willing to talk about them at any point, with anyone. (Something about myself I think I still hold to, even while possessing completely different beliefs.)
I’m not smart enough to offer the succinct takes on what is happening in our post-9/11 world — though I like this Jacobin article about how it essentially ushered in a Dark Ages era; the mainstream news, long called “liberal” by conservatives, has truly never been anything but conservative since — all opinions must be carefully curated around patriotism. Unsure, mostly powerless leftists haven’t sufficiently figured out how to deal with this patriotism or the backlash that comes from decrying it, and worthless, elitist liberals seem to win elections based only on how bad the other guys are. And the other guys are indeed bad: conservatives are more far-right than ever, authoritarian monsters, explicit fascists, and willing to let us all die en masse from a pandemic while simultaneously jailing women for having abortions in Texas.
All I know is that I watched 9/11 happen, and then it felt like nothing good ever happened for America again. People wanted “hatriotism” (a word I did not create!) and war and dead brown people, and boy did we get all that. Liberals believed in Obama (I was still a Ron Paul gal at this time) but he compromised heavily with the devils of the GOP and got nothing for it, and is now happier being another rich guy on Martha’s Vineyard having parties with celebrities. Trump, who on the day 9/11 happened joked that his tower "was now the biggest” became president and emboldened all the worst raging people who just want us to fucking murder and jail dissenters of all kinds already.
There was no critical reflection. Not from either major political party, not from the mainstream media, not from almost anybody, or anybody big or important, anyway. Nobody asked, “Why are there terrorists? Where did they come from? Who funded them? Why do they hate us? How were they radicalized? Where did their weapons come from? How can we make amends?" People were a lot more interested in abusing and killing Arab-Americans in the aftermath of their hatred than they were in looking at issues systemically. In fact, I think the United States as a whole is incapable of looking at the big picture and fixing issues systemically — we are only good at knee-jerk reactions and benefitting from tragedy whether we caused it or someone else did, and it’s usually the former. So many people got rich from the fallout of 9/11 that it would be hard to pinpoint the biggest criminal on many sides.
One of my all-time favorite clips about September 11th, 2001 was in one of my favorite shows of all time, Ramy, about an Muslim Arab-American family. (You should watch it.) In Season One, the episode “Strawberries” aired and it took us to a flashback of young Ramy, in middle school during 9/11, just like me. The show’s setting is in New Jersey, and one of his classmates lost a mother in the attacks. It depicts hatred the Arab-American family receives after the attacks, and the father dutifully hoisting up an American flag on his front porch while waving at neighbors, terrified that he will be a target next. You had to be a “good Muslim” and you could never, ever criticize American policies or culture.
But the most interesting scene in the episode is when young Ramy has a hallucinatory conversation with Osama Bin Laden, who explains exactly why he hates America and how many people have died thanks to U.S. imperialism. He discusses the true facts — that fields once reserved for growing wheat for Egypt were now being used to grow strawberries, so that Americans could have strawberries in the off-season, leading to Egyptian loss of income and food in favor of American greed and gluttony, which is only one microscopic segment of how imperialism functions on a global scale. Meanwhile, Egyptians were forbidden from eating the strawberries to be sold to America and other western countries. (This is all true, by the way.) Ramy sees Bin Laden’s point, but eventually rejects his path of violence anyway, even though Bin Laden correctly warns Ramy that the USA will never fully accept him.
Twenty years later, I see people yearn for the UNITY we had after 9/11. But where did that unity lead us? It certainly didn’t lead to a better world. “We’re more divided than ever!” people proclaim as 4.55 million people have died during a pandemic, plagued by lack of vaccination and masking and common sense and trust in science or each other. It’s true: we all hate each other now.
But unlike others, I don’t crave a sense of unity like we had 9/11, because it led to nothing good. The false, gooey patriotism, the uncritical support of our country — I participated in all of it, but it didn’t make one fucking lick of difference in the war on terror, in anyone’s personal freedom, or the well-being of most Americans, much less people outside the USA. Veterans from those needless wars have some of the highest suicide rates of anyone in the world, and our country absolutely doesn’t give a shit about them. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin haven’t shared any of their profits from weapon creation with the rest of us. The Taliban isn’t even gone. What was the fucking point, huh?
Obviously, the problem runs deeper than a few billion dollars’ worth of weapons can handle. So maybe we, especially those of us who are Americans, should be asking ourselves what the problem actually is, and how we can solve it instead of shooting at it and hoping it goes away. The lives lost matter, and every life that has been lost in relation to it since then matters too. If you actually want to honor the victims, you can move toward creating a world where nobody goes hungry growing out-of-season strawberries for rich people overseas. Because after watching that episode, and after decades of research and facts on U.S. intervention on the rest of the world, that’s something I’m never going to forget.