Does America know how to mourn 9/11?
To readers:
I have not written much over the summer for my blog, but today I wanted to offer you something special. Audrey Connor, who is an assistant in our photo department, wrote a thoughtful piece on 9/11, how mourning has seemingly become commercial in some aspects and how one of the most somber days in America's modern history has moved her. Let us know what you think.
By Audrey Connor
This week marks the 14th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Over dinner the other night, my dad recalled the morning in detail; the name of the boy who first told him about the plane crashes, the tears that made the wild truth believable running down his face. I was in first grade at the time. I remember being handed a slip of paper from my teacher to take home to my parents, explaining how the event would be treated by the staff at the school in front of its students. That period became the genesis of plane-crash nightmares that have consistently visited me multiple times a year ever since.
As a grown woman, I traveled to the memorial site over the summer, which I wrote about here. Friday on Buzzfeed, I found an excellent essay written by the brother of a 9/11 victim that speaks to an observation I had at the site of the footprints; somehow, in the process of trying to understand it, we’ve managed to make death a gaudy spectacle.
When I walked the 9/11 memorial site, I felt closer to the universal force that is often called “God” in a way I will never be able to recapture the privilege of; yet the manner of inherent truth it held for me will never let me go. As someone who has lived with panic disorder for close to two years, I have come to accept death as a natural element that does not necessarily entail fear.
Last weekend, when I awoke to a man standing across from my bed as I slept, the fear I felt was derived moreso from anger of having my space invaded than from concern about my wellbeing; even though in retrospect, the dude, brandishing a roofing knife, could have killed me and my roommate if he really had an itch to do so. That is certainly intense. But it didn’t frighten me out of yelling expletives at him as he ran down a corridor to another part of my house. The presence of death or its possibility deserves our utmost respect in the moment it manifests. Which is why I can speak to a large amount of frustration that in its aftermath, the commercialization and sensationalizing of September 11th is a truly frightening entity that hurts our integrity as humans.
For years, I have listened to acquaintances who also consider themselves on the “fringe” of mainstream society treat the events in a tone more reactionary towards the faults in our government than the attack itself. In their attempts to distance themselves from the American ideology of patriotism, they’ve forgotten how treat tragedy with the weight it holds regardless of the circumstances surrounding it. And the dozens upon dozens of tourists I observed walking Ground Zero with foam fingers, taking selfies and completely disengaged from the immensity of their surroundings? The kind of people these acquaintances would mock for their ignorance? Honestly, the differences between the two factions cease to truly hold any gravity when the basis of their behavior shares such a disturbing commonality.
Because on 9/11, it seemed like fatality itself belonged to our country. Drown out all of the background noise---Bush’s call for revenge, the resulting epidemic of Islamophobia, the political chipmunk chatter---and you have a singular case of mass killing that infected the world with grief. The aftershock of planes hitting towers created a domino effect of incidents throughout the world, resulting in untold loss of life. Culturally, I fear for what the word “tragedy” has become as it is delivered out of the mouths of talk show hosts and printed in large headlines by newspapers nowadays. Voyeurism is to be expected, as the need for answers will always be integral to human nature. But when it becomes more prominent than the pain that haunts the living, I wonder where our conscience goes- both towards our own lives and the lives of others.
In the aftermath of last week’s break-in, I don’t like to entertain the notion that under different circumstances, in my seemingly impenetrable fortress of a home, I could have met an end of some sort. The fact is, I didn’t, and to say “what if” holds no meaning to me in a world where around 150,000 people perish daily. To aggrandize this reality with the elements of fear does not leave us the room to give ourselves freely to our true feelings.
Fourteen years later, I don’t believe that America has truly figured out how to mourn 9/11, because all of the ripple effects and media hums drowned the straightforwardness of its devastation. Beyond the 2,605 of our own, we lost a sense of fragile peace that may never be restored.
On the fourth finger of my left hand—you know, the one reserved for jewelry denoting one’s marital status—the love I wear is a different kind. The ring around it belonged to my grandmother Mary Lou Joseph, who passed away in 2009. It was given to me shortly before I left for my travels this summer, much of which were spent revisiting her passing in the way one does after they lose a close loved one; a process that never ends. A process one may never have all the time they need to truly finish. In all of its incarnations, mortality itself never truly disappears as long as you’re walking on this green Earth. I suggest that we stop neglecting to treat it with the dignity we are prone to forgetting it demands of us.
