 My cousins, Kevin, Mark and Thomas, in the late 1970s, on a Circle Line tour around Manhattan. |
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 My sisters, mother, and me, on Liberty Island, NJ, 1982. Photo by my father, Mike Ott.
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Never forget. There was always that breathtaking moment on the New Jersey Turnpike when my father would point out, "There they are. Do you see them?" And the three of us in the back seat, children of the 1970s, would fill with awe, as the Twin Towers became visible on the horizon. We'd press northward, to visit family and friends, never able to avert our eyes from the giant twin buildings that dwarved everything else. Christimastime, 2001. I was on the Turnpike again, New York City-bound, with the echo of my father's proud voice: "Do you see them?" He disliked the hubbub of New York City, but was moved and astonished by what we human beings created. The completion of the World Trade Center, to my father, was one of humanity's greatest achievements. And so, I always search for them on that stretch of the Turnpike, like I did as a child. Since there's always so much haze, so many distractions, in those early seconds that the Towers' peek over the horizon, that it's hard to see them right away, and usually, I never spot them until Manhattan Island, in all its glory, is visible. Only, I know they're gone. My eyes, instead, are drawn to the vacuum they left behind. Now it's August 2006, we're approaching the five year anniversary of the terrorist attacks. Americans, I read in Utne Magazine, are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, due to the events five years ago. I was surprised to read that even those in far corners of our nation, like New Mexico, are suffering just as badly as those of us here on the east coast, those of us who have lost loved ones, neighbors. Maybe post traumatic stress explains my visceral reaction to the movie trailers that have come out this year: first "Flight 93," and now Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center." I hate to judge movies before I see them because I often find that I am surprised the most by the movies I want to see the least. But I can't bring myself to watch these movies. Not yet. They seem to exploit the families of the victims; they seem to exploit Americans' collective open wound. They may be useful to teenagers, who were too young in 2001 to really grasp the magnitude of the events that day, but I'm not sure they can provide any sort of catharsis for anyone who is now over the age of 25. And making any sort of profit by pouring salt into our raw injury just seems offensive to me. But I could be too quick to judge. And as we gear up to this sad anniversary, my friend John seems to send more and more 9/11-centric email forwards. He rarely sends any personal email anymore, claiming he's too busy. But he's always up for forwarding mail, links, and cool websites; it dawns on me that he must have read/watched what he's sending along, some of which is quite lengthy. Lately, these email forwards contain links and images that surround September 11, and the sentiments of some "patriotic" comedians. And while it frustrates me that John seldom responds in a personal, meaningful way after I send a note, drop off a package, leave a message, I do read these messages, first, because I have found many of his forwards to be funny and/or enlightening. I am wary about the ones that center around September 11, and I read them only because I feel that I owe it to the people who died on that day. I watch John's PowerPoint presentation attachments and the Flash web links. I see those images of people leaping to their deaths, falling head first from those giant towers that once impressed my father so; and I hope, that somehow these images have been constructed on a computer; that these people are not really falling. I hope, despite the fact that I am well aware of the gaping hole on Lower Manhattan, the ending will change for the better. I am stupid. The ending is always the same -- gut-wrenching. I wind up crying, like I did in September 2001: we have lost so much more than the nearly 3,000 people who died that day. The words of the "patriotic" comedians that John sends to his undisclosed list of recipients illustrate that. We have lost our ability to see the big picture; I realize, as Americans, we may not have been able to see the global picture of the world the way other nations do; but many of us closed down even further after the attacks of September 11, 2001. We have lost the feeling that we were special in all of the world. We have lost the ability to care about anything outside of our immediate circle. To me, there's nothing funny (or helpful) about shouting at immigrants to speak English; there's nothing useful about telling foreigners to stay home and fix their own countries. How can they? Despite American intervention, we haven't been able to "fix" any other country (particularly in recent years), and we're an entire nation with a strong military and bountiful resources. And we, as individuals, have very little ability to effect change here in our country, no matter what we believe. And while I am filled with grief for what we've lost and what we've become, I believe in this country. I know that, flaws and all, there's a good chance, our system works better than other regimes. But I find it extremely hypocritical for any of us to tell foreigners to stay home. How soon we forget that the reason we're here is because our not-so-distant relatives were often non-English speaking foreigners who wanted to have better lives. Their brave struggles are the whole reason we exist. As each day passes, we continue to suffer obvious losses: we've lost nearly 2,500 members of the US military in Iraq, since 2003; more than 300 US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October 2001. We have watched or read about the beheading of many of our own people: contractors, journalists. In total, that's nearly as many people who were killed on September 11, 2001. And that doesn't include the deaths of our allies' military personnel. As each day passes, we continue to suffer less obvious losses, too. There is a lot of debate over how many Iraqis and Afghanis who have been killed since the US and Coalition forces arrived in those countries. According to the Iraq Body Count, over 40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed or been injured since the arrival of the US military in 2003. My brain can't even make sense of that number. FORTY THOUSAND DEATHS SINCE WE ARRIVED? Many agencies claim there have been more deaths than 40,000. Didn't we invade under the pretense of helping the Iraqi people? Why aren't we outraged? Marc Herold, PhD, professor in the Departments of Economics and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics, runs a website memorial dedicated to Afghan victims. I thought I might be able to quickly scroll through the list of dead to get a bead on how many Afghanis have been killed, and it occurred to me that each of these names in the near endless list of names is associated with a once-living person; a person who was loved and who loved. A person now needlessly dead because our country needed to exact revenge on a relatively small group of people holed up in Afghanistan. The number of civilians killed in Afghanistan has been difficult to validate, but it may exceed 4,000. How many of them were in school, or attending weddings, gathering for a meal, struggling to get by from day to day, living their lives, like we do? How many more people around the world need to die? Our dead are still dead, and nothing will bring them back. A Canadian friend who never visited New York City, is the chief of a fire department in Toronto. His reaction to the attacks on September 11, 2001, was profound, because of the number of emergency personnel lost that day. "How big were the Towers?" he asked quietly. And I think of the picture my father took of his wife and three children from Liberty Island in the 1970s not long after the completion of the Towers; how we were standing so far away from those buildings, and how much further my father had to back up to frame his family AND the buildings in the camera's viewfinder. "Bigger than you could ever imagine," I said. With the five year anniversary approaching, I realize that we are capable of creation AND destruction that far exceeds our collective imaginations. There are so many "never forget" themed messages and products. We don't need the bumper sticker directing us to never forget. We don't need the disaster movies. Or the mass email messages. We will never forget even if we wanted to; how could we? There is still a massive hole in New York City, and our hearts, both bigger than we could ever imagine. But please not let us forget also what's slipping away SINCE 9/11. We need to never forget our faith in humanity. Let us not forget our good will. Let us not forget the great, towering things we were once capable of, and may still be capable of, if not for our need to punish the rest of the world. In our hearts, we are all the same, and that is what we need to never forget.
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