Only Three of Many Memories

[The Memorial Quilt for 9/11 - partial view]

My job at a transcription service gave me a compendium of information. I was the one who most often transcribed tapes with foreign speakers/ I had listened to a Japanese, or perhaps a Singaporean businessman, speaking about "the world trade center" in Singapore, thus learning that the one in NYC was not the only one in the world. When the owner of the company sought me out in my little cubby-office, since I was usually the first to arrive and he often second, he said, "An airplane has run into the World Trade Center." I asked "Which one, where?"

"Here. Ours," he said. A little later he came to tell me it was not an isolated accident.

Several hours later I walked three miles north, alone. The streets were nearly empty, Times Square was strangely desserted. Two tourists were staring at the lighted news strip that usually gave stock market numbers. It gave the planes' number and number of passengers. An evangelist thrust a tract at me, I gave him a fiercely cold stare and walked on through the eerie emptiness and quiet that occasionally carried a distant siren wailing its way to a hospital.

Days later, when the subway was running again, people made eye contact with strangers and began telling their stories, "I was on my way to work..." "My wife called me to say ..." Small memories -- even those with mere crumbs of memory, like mine, wanted to testify that they, too, were touched.

9/11/2008

When I awoke at 5;00 I reached for the on button on the clock radio which is always tuned to WQXR, the classical music station of the NY Times. Soon I heard an announcer say there would be no commercials today, only music -- chosen, I knew, with their usual care. Nothing maudlin, just wonderful music. This is a station, reader, that you can access on the web.

An email friend from the hinterlands twits me a fair amount about political subjects; we disagree approximately 120%. Sometimes the emails are serious, he's really not a knee jerk guy - retired military so ... but a recent note listed things he sees wrong with the US and he mentioned that "people forget 9/11". In his"that day" memories that are not just about what we saw on TV.

But the subtext was that people fault Bush, or self-proclaimed "war president" for the war in Iraq because they forget 9/11. But what has that war done? Killed as many of our men and women as the terrorists did, and left thousand more disabled and deeply traumatized, destroyed a country that was actually not a threat to us. It has not "got" the terrorists but has spawned more. And at home? The paranoiac fear has been used to ignore both our Constitution and international agreements, it has given us a 1984 type surveilence system and made air travel an irritation that raises nearly everyone's blood pressure while demeaning millions of well meaning Americans with intrusive search practices carried out by half-trained personnel who become mini-tyrants or mental neo-nazis who make everyone take off their shoes and forfeit their water bottles. Here in NYC I can expect to have most of my moves in public recorded on cameras. Are we safer? Have we won respect around the world? And when will the economy recover from the costs of this assinine war? This has not been an eye for an eye which is a horrible, primitive motto, this has been seven years of wishing I didn't live in a country with such "leadership."

I wish I felt there was true change in the air, I wish I felt some of that "hope" to be real and not rhetorical. I remember too many wars in just my life time. And too many Presidents who were "not crooks" but not fine leaders -- by a long shot.