Do you remember where you were?
(+0 years)
Often enough the question is “do you remember where you were?” Most people do remember, easily, and even if they don’t remember they just as easily make something up. But as the years roll on and the distance from the moment grows, more and more people can’t answer that question. They weren’t born yet. Even still, those that weren’t born yet, or don’t have a good answer, live in proximity to the moment one way or another. Most can’t properly explain their proximity therein. There is no carbon dating in the “post-historical” world. Even those who spent the hours after the first tower collapsed covered in dirt and soot, the metaphysical proximity to the events can’t be determined with certainty as our connection to the events flex and change throughout time and space.
But we all live in proximity, and everyone does the math at some point. For me, I was 7, and in 2nd grade. Ms. Gordon’s class. At some point in the morning kids were being called to the front office inexplicably. At first it was a couple kids, who confusingly walked out of the classroom, only a hall away from the pick-up point. We just assumed they had something going on at home. With more and more kids getting called up, the lessons for the day were pretty much off the table and Ms. Gordon was just kind of sitting there doing random shit, assumingly trying to keep us confused kids distracted or preoccupied with the fact that we weren’t lucky enough to go home before lunch. Eventually, someone asked Ms. Gordon what was going on, and in a moment of impressive stoicism or lack of awareness, she simply answered in a dead-pan manner “some kind of explosion in the city.”
For those of us that grew up in lower New York and tri-state area, we generally describe our hometowns in terms of our proximity to New York City. “About an hour and a half north” has been my answer since I moved out of Newburgh at the age of 18. Ok, I thought to myself, there was an explosion an hour and a half away, what was the big deal? The nightly news in our area was the “New York Metropolitan” news, where anchors cut their teeth dealing with the business oriented and diverse population of New York City and it’s labor/support base in the tri-state before they move into those national programs filmed in the touristy part of Manhattan with all the mid-westerners and rural upstaters holding up signs. Those local news agents talked about “explosions” all the time and it never gets us out of class, I thought, except my conception of “explosion” was more of a Con-Ed transformer or manhole going “boom.”
Then I was called. I either remember it clearly or my brain has filled in the gaps after all these years: my father, not a physically big man but a man with a big presence when in a group of other suburban parents, locks his eyes onto me as soon as I’m in his field of view. His proximity to the event was much closer as he grew up in the Bronx, spent his formative years in the US Navy and National Guard, and spent his early days of fatherhood working in Manhattan. “Let’s go” is all he says as I reach out for his hand. Was there something I was supposed to do when explosions happen?
I felt like I had done something wrong. I don’t remember the brief ride home, but I assume my father was on his small company provided cellphone checking where my older sisters were. 11 and 15, their proximity to the event even closer than me but not closer than our parents. My father’s anxiety overwhelming him so much that I begin to be worried that whatever was going on may have involved my sisters. I finally find a moment to ask him what was going on. “It was fuckin’ terrorists, same shit they did before.” I now know he was referring to the February 26, 1993 bombing, almost a year to the day prior to my birthday, but at the time it was gibberish besides the swears. We quickly get home and confirm my sisters are safe and on their way home.
My next memory of the day was watching a monumental historical shift in real time. As we walked into the house I recall my mom terrifyingly telling my father that a plane had hit the Pentagon. My father now wasn’t sure if it was a declaration of war from Iraq or Libya after his almost prophetic observation about the ’93 attack. By the time I was focused on those familiar voices of that day’s NYC news anchors, I remember the horror in my mother’s face as the South Tower fell. She was from the city as well. My father grew even angrier, desperately trying to call our family who still lived or work in city limits. I remember a phone being slammed as people inadvertently panic dialed our home. By the time the North Tower fell, both of my parents were in tears. It was the first of two times I’ve ever seen my father cry. Looking back it was my first indication of a genetic disposition towards a rageful empathy that runs in and colors the politics of the five of us, myself and my sisters included.
As the days passed, and once my father started to get confirmation that everyone in our family were alright, albeit just as confused and upset as we were, his anger started to focus again on the ’93 attacks and what the news was now crediting as “terrorists from the middle east.” A place our school lessons hadn’t started covering yet, but in an area as diverse as Newburgh I was aware of it. I asked why anyone would willingly sacrifice themselves to do something like this. Even at the time I had a fleeting concept of war and violence, but often enough suicide attacks weren’t discussed with 2nd graders. Despite my father’s rage and frustration, and despite my 7 year old sensibilities, a nuanced and even empathetic answer was given that I latched on to. “They were probably told that their families would be taken care of forever, or they were tricked by some cowards into believing they were doing the right thing.” He explained that these people were perhaps poor or downtrodden, and that the person truly responsible was probably rich, enjoying relative safety as the poor and brainwashed carried out his ideals. Even know I know he was 100% right. It’s a thought I brought with me, as the debates and analysis of 2nd graders brought out the politics and nuance of their parents.
As much as I had already started to recognize my own proximity to the event at the moment, there were kids in my school who were even closer. Not literally, but figurately. Kids who were unfortunate enough to be in that exceptionally unnuanced categories of “middle eastern” or “Islamic.” And that lack of nuance didn’t make it’s way into the conceptions of many American perceptions of the day, much less a bunch of 2nd graders. 7 year-olds being called terrorists. Kids who grew up in America desperately trying to explain the geopolitics of a region with millennia of history. I had friends who were “middle eastern” and they were just as American as I was. I tried providing the nuance my father gave in his answer when others asked that question of “why?” It often fell flat, and the kids in my school who just a month prior spent their days worrying about whether they were going to play wallball or soccer at recess now had to manage their identity, their parents’ identities, and the subsequent connection of that identity towards the politics that would result as fallout from that event. Even in the moment I rejected it, clinging to the nuance my father provided that sometimes people do terrible, evil things for reasons they think are good and that it’s the planners and leaders who are to blame the majority of the time.
More often then not, when people ask that question of where I was or what I experienced in the fallout of the event, I try not to explain all of those minor, ineffectual details I provided above. I simply answer “I was an hour and a half away.”
What does it matter to you?
(+5 years)
Maybe it’s my own toxic thought processes, but what I’m about to express probably isn’t a unique perspective. For many of us in the generations around mine, the years and events to follow all felt like continuation of the downward trend. The wars waged in reaction to the events ravaged the lower and middle class and only perpetuated the racism and identarian politics that many expressed or were forced to defend from after 9/11, much of which centered around the event that was only “an hour and a half away.” Even at the time my proximity triggered a frustration. Watching pundits and people from all over the country, from the rural south to suburban west coast, use an event so close to me and my schoolmates, to justify their racism or brutality in advocacy of warfare was infuriating. All the while I saw brothers and sisters and cousins of my friends and classmates joining the military. To wars that, at the time, we in that proximity thought were justified.
I talked to my Dad about his military experience, and like most boys got obsessed with some machine of war, in my case jets thanks to my Dad’s history of being an Aviation Technician on the USS Independence. I dreamed of being a pilot, but was deathly afraid of the thought of dropping bombs or killing the “wrong people.” To this day I’m not sure where that fear of civilian casualties came from, whether it was my underlying performance anxiety or a repressed perception of the realities of wars being decided by the protected and fought by the subjected.
My political processes began to develop, and my subsequent quest for nuance led me to want to get into geopolitics. It’s generally hard for a pre-teen from a middle class family to get into diplomacy or international relations, but I turned my interest towards history, primarily war history, and U.S. politics. My father introduced me to a man who was both an employee of his at the store he managed, as well as the mayor of a nearby town. This was something only possible in the “small town” part of the lower Hudson Valley, where the mayoral race of NYC is considered more pertinent to the politics of a given town in the area than the mayor of the town itself, hence why our mayors often had day jobs.
I spent a summer shadowing him and various Republican events. It was that summer that I discovered three things about myself: my affinity for discursive nuance, my crushing anxiety, and the fact that even at the age of 12 or 13 I disagreed with most of what these old conservative white dudes were saying. I wanted to argue and challenge my ideas and the ideas of others, but definitely didn’t want to do that by talking to people and trying to get some random dude elected to a position most people didn’t actually give a shit about.
Maybe by hanging out here I can talk about policy? This was before I discovered the linguistic similarity between “politics” and “policy” was the only similarity between the two concepts there was. My most glaring memory, besides the hot face of embarrassment when being expected to greet and engage with random people, was a particular event over the summer. A local organizer at a table I was hanging out at for campaign event during a town-fair kept trying to talk to me about politics and I didn’t know how to engage with someone I disagreed with without being a little shithead. But there was one thing that I opened up about: a major internet crackdown was taking place in Iran as a result of major protests. This organizer guy at the table was telling me about how someone he claimed to be Iranian was reaching out to him to engage with over MySpace “in the hopes that he could find support for the cause” in the states. In retrospect, after all my years of OPSEC training, I realize now the guy was probably being scammed or at the very least fucked with and that an Iranian dissident probably wouldn’t be reaching out to a Hudson Valley Republican organizer for political or financial support.
But still, I believed this guy and I heard him out. And more importantly, this guy believed in what was happening, and he showed clear empathy. An event had taken this person’s political focus from local tax codes and zoning law and “getting revenge for 9/11” to the emancipation of what he believed to be an oppressed group. “They’re not bad people, it’s their government that’s bad” he said to me, a lesson he had really only internalized recently as his proximity to the people of Iran was shrunk. I told him the lesson my dad taught me after the 9/11 attacks about understanding what people do in desperation. He nodded in agreement. As he and I were discussing this, the first time I had truly begun to open up in this new space, an angry local walked up to the table. I don’t remember the details of what he was angry about, but I only remember that it was a local issue. Maybe it was because of our discussion, or because of this organizer’s newfound proximity to the “Iranians” at the time, he mentioned how the conversations he had been having over MySpace with these “Iranians.”
“What does it matter to you?” the man said. “You guys can’t even fix the roads in your own town and you’re telling me about Iran. We could bomb the shit out of them for all I care after what they did on 9/11.” The organizer, probably recognizing that he was there for fundraising and not discourse, slumped his shoulders and nodded in agreement with something he had just minutes ago outwardly rejected. His only response being “what do we need to get your vote?”
Much to my father’s shagreen, and without explaining exactly why, I stopped working with the mayor and realized at that moment the difference between politics and policy.
What are we up against?
(+10 years)
We were only in 8th grade, but thanks to being in honors and “advanced” classes we already had teachers preaching the gospel of higher education and the Sisyphean task of building a university application. I fucking sucked at baseball, the only sport I liked, so the intellectual route seemed the most likely for me. It had been a year or two after that fateful summer, but I started to think that bailing on local politics might had been me losing out on my best chance at getting the hell out of Newburgh. As the term “extra curricular” became more and more common at my junior high, a flyer came into class with an activity that I actually seemed like I’d be interested in.
I was right, and I finally found an outlet for my pent up discursive energy. From that introductory class after school, where the debate coaches explained the general gist of debate as an educational and sport like activity, I was fairly certain I had found my calling. There were two events, one where you were solo called Lincoln Douglas. Policy debate was a 4+ person event. 2vs2 with 1 or more judges. My debate partner for most years and topics was one of those kids mentioned earlier in even closer proximity to the attacks by virtue of “being middle eastern and Islamic.” We had stayed friends through middle school and I had basically conditioned my participation in debate off of him, whether he knew it or not. No way was I going to go to some random club at the high school with a bunch of strangers, but if he went I’d go. He probably went because of a bunch of other middle eastern and asian students had gone, a stereotype that just about everyone in debate acknowledged.
And we stuck it out for a few years. We were told we were good, we won a decent amount, and we had been exposed to a plethora of ideas. One we famously clung to was the concept of “Orientalism” by Edward Said. In the namesake book, Said explains that the lens with which that Europe historically viewed the Asian continent, primarily the “Near and Middle East” was large and vague, exemplified by the term “The Orient” so famously used in historic texts. That same all encompassing reduction of a large and diverse region pervaded American intellectualism and policy making, so much so Said reprinted his 1978 book explaining the concept with a new preface in 2003 speaking specifically about how reductionism influenced American policy makers and, more importantly, the American public after the 9/11 attacks. Said explained 5 days after the attack: “This is a war against terrorism, everyone says, but where, on what fronts, for what concrete ends? No answers are provided, except the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what ‘we’ are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed.”
For my friend it was a perspective he felt immediately evident being a Muslim born and raised in American in proximity to 9/11. For years he had dealt with the reduction in real time, which he often attributed to idiocy and ignorance. But now we understood that often these issues are rooted in reality that exists beyond ourselves. For me, it was confirmation of nuance I had learned years prior, which combined with my own experiences in an upwardly mobile middle class family and in a town affectionally referred to by others in the area as the “6th borough of New York City” because of negative connotations, resulted in my development as a political materialist. Ideologies, actions, and hierarchies being colored more so by class and wealth than vis-versa.
By the 10 year anniversary of the attacks I was in the midst of crises of my own making. After several years learning and thinking through debate, making friends and cracking my way out of my shell, a combination of a changing team budget, a resurgence of my own performance anxiety that told me I was holding my partner and the team down, and a false conception that my not having a “real” job was making me inferior in life and manhood. I quit, and got a job at McDonald’s, a place where the nuance of the attacks were gone and after 10 years all I heard was the same reductionism I heard from the 2nd graders days after the attack. In the summer of that year, 4 young Muslim men were entrapped by the FBI in Newburgh by a taskforce and intelligence apparatus built and empowered after 9/11, bringing the proximity of the event even closer to home.
To be frank though, I probably hadn’t even noticed the day in 2011. But after speaking with my friend about his performance against a particularly reactionary argument at a tournament I originally planned on attending, he said “we won on Orientalism, it’s only appropriate given the anniversary.”
All-hands are invited to the 9/11 cake cutting
(+15 years)
Against the better judgement of just about everyone around me, I chose to attend Pace University after High School. I was well aware of the risk all these student loans would hold, but I was over-confident in my resourcefulness, and I thought the change of scenery would motivate me to develop in spite of my chronic underachievement and procrastination. The campus I lived on was only a few blocks away from the One World Trade, idiotically referred to as the “Freedom Tower” as if Al-Qaeda would be punching the drywall at the idea of a decadent high rise being built at Ground Zero for a bunch of overpriced white collar office space while first responders continued to not be provided proper assistance and healthcare for the ailments they selflessly accepted.
I had countless arguments both in my own head and with my father regarding my rejection of the idea of enlisting or going through ROTC. I didn’t want to participate in wars I didn’t approve of, and participate in the death of people I knew to be innocent for an event whom I knew the Powers that Be didn’t actually care about other than a justification to enact their policies. But while my frustration with American policy after 9/11 solidified as my leftist tendencies began to develop, I conversely started to revere those first responders and those who reacted to the event selflessly. The firefighters, the EMTs, the people that opted to join the military even though they disagreed with the wars.
While at Pace I began to interact with modern veterans. Guys who weren’t too far off politically from me. I started to understand a concept of service that was based more on assuming a noble cause in an ennoble environment. I read up on Pat Tillman, James Mattis, and Smedley Butler, men who saw war and the military-industrial complex for what it was and chose not to use their status of veteran as a perpetuation of it, but as a means of limiting it by injecting their own ethics and morals in their service. At the time I didn’t know of the details of Tillman’s death, Mattis’ work as a MIC lobbyist, or that Butler’s anti-war activism was after decades of violence. But the idea of “you’d rather a good person who thinks war is bad enlist, than a bad person who wants war to enlist” was the justification I heard and needed to consider joining, but it’d be after university.
University didn’t work out. The same mental crises that pervaded my mind in my last year of debate expressed themselves again my sophomore year. I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t smart enough, I was too lazy and I was broken. My mind drifted more and more towards my reverence towards service, aided by the promise of developing my chosen career of IT and paying off all those loans I should’ve been more wary of. Perhaps service would fix me? I’d be trained, I’d have money, I’d be motivated both physically and spiritually. At first I legitimately considered the Marines. I met several 0651s at Pace who seemed like smart guys and had avoided the worst the wars had to offer. But after consideration I chose the Navy to extend my father’s legacy and to preemptively mend the stress that dropping out of Pace would have on our relationship. I could never imagine telling him “you were right, I shouldn’t have rushed into school” but the comradery of a shared experience at sea would do. For what it’s worth, I said exactly that years later.
Ever present in boot-camp were the still persistent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and both consequentially and directly, so too was the image of 9/11. For the first time I started meeting people face to face, not pundits and talking heads, who felt a closer proximity to the attacks despite their physical proximity being so vast at the time. Even 15 years later, there were people citing 9/11 and “getting revenge” as their motivating factor for enlistment. Never Forget. I felt like I was back in time, having with the same argument I had had with the other 2nd graders and having the nuance I was taught hit a wall when expressed, except these were grown adults. Their refusal to accept nuance wasn’t due to their lack of maturity or intellect, it was a willing rejection. I was frustrated. I had spent years moving away from 9/11 and justifying my service in a way that wouldn’t accept responsibility for the Orientalist conceptions of the “global war on terror” and the middle east in general. The ethics I insisted I wouldn’t participate in and accept were staring right at me.
What was even more apparent, though, was an apathy. I expected to meet more people like me and the veteran friends I made at Pace who served with a certain sense of ethics. As much as I met people who joined to “get revenge,” I met much more people who just didn’t give a fuck. The day was just a refence point, just as detached form their ethic as Pearl Harbor or the first Gulf war. This culminated in a day I couldn’t have even conceived of as a dark-comedy script.
September 11th, 2016. A remembrance day event was being held on my ship, deployed at the time in the Red Sea in support of a bombing campaign against Syria, an area fraught with conflict that was a direct result of our destabilizing military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wondered what the event would entail, as throughout the day announcement were made detailing the times and events of major moments that I remember more so through the faces and explanations of my teacher and parents than a pure sequence of physical happenings. Myself and a friend, a fellow New Yorker and someone in proximity to the event via space, time, and personal connection to victims, weren’t exactly excited when we read the a particular detail of the event: cake cutting. We were eating a fucking cake in service of “never forgetting.”
As much as I wanted to dodge the event, I had little say in the manner. One of the people responsible for the events of the day was a supervisor of mine who, despite his outweighing me in rank and experience, wasn’t even trusted to reliably present a PowerPoint on the TV. I opened the document on the laptop to prep the event and became enraged almost as much as my father was during the day itself: the “presentation” was nothing but pictures of the Towers in the midst of the events as they unfolded. The planes hitting, the fires, pictures of people jumping out of the fucking buildings from 20+ stories up out of desperation. I sat through the whole presentation with my back to the screen, a protest most likely unnoticed and attributed more towards my social anxieties and resting bitch face than an act of mild civil disobedience.
The presentation was over, and the floor was opened to those who were in proximity to the event. Several New Yorkers talked about the event literally, where they were in the city when it happened and what it was like dealing with the shutdown transportation lines, or losing loved ones in the attack. Others talked about what serving was like on that day, a well spoken chief explaining what it was like being on a ship that rushed into the New York Sound as a defensive measure. Others, like those who I met throughout service, talked veiledly about joining to “defend America from another 9/11” and referenced our support of combat operations in Syria, as if we were literally stopping 9/11s every day instead of causing them. The cake was just sitting there. My ethical compromises of 2 years prior felt like a literal weight on my shoulders.
Eventually I took the mic. I wasn’t eloquent, I wasn’t profane or profound. I was clearly agitated, explaining how the day should be more about remembering with honor the selfless that responded in the moment, and how we ought to be supporting first responders that literally gave up their lives and health instead of pretending we as American Sailors sitting miles away in the ocean were exceptional in our service. My CO thanked me for the speech and called for the cake cutting to begin. He clearly didn’t listen to me at all. I handed off the mic and planned my escape. As I discretely tried to sneak out of the back of the room, I heard the Captain ask for the New Yorkers to come up front for the cake cutting. I was stopped, and the Captain called me by name, knowing I was from New York not from my speech, but from being familiar with his neighborhood in the East Village. I shook my head in protest, but it apparently came out as more of a polity. I saw my leadership in the room look at me, glaring, and at the time of my service I thought I had no choice but to oblige. Here I am, after all this time in proximity to this day (physically, morally, and in thought) with all this ethical weight, and I’m cutting a cake on the day to remember it.
The next year I gave a better speech and verbally refused to cut any cake, and the following years I refused to attend remembrance events at all, opting to donate to First Responder funds in private instead.
Where were you?
(+20 years)
Fast forward to today. My service is over, but I’m still “in” the Navy and, resultantly, still in close proximity to the event. Now I am, no, WE as Americans, are once again in much closer proximity to the event, in a multitude of obvious and non-obvious ways. For me, I am much closer physically to the wars that resulted. My job puts me in somewhat indirect support of the refugee efforts that have been enacted thanks to a haphazardly, albeit 15 year late, withdrawal from Afghanistan originally intended on being complete on this day. The war in Iraq is even less on the margin thanks to it’s distant, nearly unrelated cousin conflict being front and center.
Even better, or even worse, the 20th anniversary is being overshadowed by a new historic cataclysm. COVID-19 and the subsequent transfer of wealth as a result of it’s mismanagement and the general degrading of the American political and administrative institutions. A degrading that some believe started on September 11th, 2001 when it became clear that institutional management and trust was no longer the concern of many American leaders and a decent chunk of it’s citizenship. Anyone who’s been invested in policy and geopolitics, much like Professor Said, knows that institutional dishonesty extends well into pre-history and often serves fairly significant purpose. The ability to cause distrust and the inability to gain trust are central to modern policy analysis. Even those who propose bullshit theories of history being “over” prior to 9/11 and the resultant conflicts, see institutional distrust as largely indicative of political decay in the Western world.
On the 20th anniversary, I spent the first half of the day bitching about having to work on a weekend without overtime for something I knew would be a problem when others refused to listen to me. My explanation of the nuance of an event was ignored because everyone had convinced themselves they knew better because they were “closer in proximity” to the planning (so thank the schmuck who used that phrase on me last week for the theme of this essay.) But in the midst of that bitchfest my coworker pointed out the date and asked it, the same question that’s always asked: “Where were you?”
My mind didn’t go to the details. I have been practicing in recent years to shift my thought processes towards hope, wherever in the moment it may be. I thought of the first responders who, after years of fighting, have been able to secure future healthcare and compensation for the ailments they were originally told wasn’t the responsibility of “the government.” I think of the 13 marines and corpsman who, better than I ever could, were able to give themselves up to honor the living and expend their own spirits in protection of others in Afghanistan refugee efforts, eschewing the mistakes and misdeeds of the policy makers prior potentially in spite of their own ethical and ideological conceptions. I think of the service members and veterans and victims of racism in the aftermath of the attack who experienced the worst of humanity who’ve held onto hope and continued to see the potential for people, even those who for some reason or another express or have been brainwashed to hate for them.
I think of those who support victims of the attack and the victims of the responses to those attacks. I think of those who, even in the midst of the cataclysmic event 20 years ago that truly pushed our history into an objectively bad direction, have given selflessly despite so many of us being apathetic or adversarial against those that were also victims of that day. And I think about how I can take that information and live up to that selflessness in an age where selflessness is so far from the norm, where thinking of one’s own “rights” and being is considered infinitely more important then the life and happiness of some “other.”
“I was an hour and a half away. And now I’m here.”
