By Claire Parsons
My lack of reflection on 9/11 anniversary
The anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history is this week, and I find myself shocked by one thing and one thing only: my own lack of emotion about the subject. I cried a year ago when I first heard what happened, but now I feel an overwhelming sense of nothing. You may find me callous or cruel, or just plain uncaring, but I will not lie. I don’t feel very much about the September 11th anniversary. It just seems so long ago and so far away.
Perhaps a year isn’t that long ago and New York isn’t that far away, but when you have no connection to September 11th in New York City except through Peter Jennings or Tom Brokaw, it can certainly seem like it. Sure, I felt sad and scared and angry when I saw the blatant disregard for life, but I had no real personal connection to the event itself. Seeing horror and its aftermath unfold on the news was simply too much like watching a movie. I could never reconcile it with reality, so I never was too shaken by what happened.
We Americans live our lives from crisis to crisis. We have been trained to do so by politicians, the media, and each other. Crises give our lives context and meaning in a world that seems to be lacking in both nowadays. September 11th was a crisis of immense proportions; there can be no denying that. But the heartache and sadness that was unleashed on that day was exploited, packaged, and sold to us consumers just like any other crisis.
As the planes were crashing into the World Trade Center, television news stations were drooling over the footage that they could peddle to the masses. And they did endlessly. Hours after the crash, the politicians of America banded together to make their formal statements and expressions of grief and sympathy to their constituents. Days later, President Bush was starting his “War on Terrorism” to root out the “evildoers” who caused the atrocities in New York. Simultaneously, he began his rise in approval ratings. Within a month, the bottom feeders of capitalism came out of the woodwork with their “commemorative” pieces of WTC memorabilia. It all seemed too well coordinated. So many people from a range of fields capitalized on the astounding loss of life of September 11th and the inevitable panic that ensued. Eventually the things that were contrived after September 11th seemed to be more real than the day itself. I suppose that is the point I lost emotional contact.
To drastically understate, September 11th was sad. It shook our nation to the core and rocked everything we thought to be certain. However, that was a year ago, and some semblance of stability and normalcy seems to have been reestablished. We have new crises to deal with now. Time marches on, and for most of us, it marches on too quickly. A year probably isn’t enough time to cope with such a catastrophe as September 11th as a nation. However, is rerunning the footage of the day a way of learning to cope with it, or is it just the obvious choice of lazy television networks?
We all deal with tragedy in our own ways. Some Americans will watch every minute of the anniversary coverage. Some won’t watch any. My only fear is that after a year people may be still trying to glean some meaning from what happened on September 11th, to piece together some reason why this awful thing happened. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to do so. I will be among the people not watching CNN all day on September 11, 2002.
