By the time you read this, you may have justifiably wearied of 9/11 observances. However, I ask your indulgence. Each of us who is old enough, everyone over the age of 14, probably, remembers where we were when we first learned of the attacks. I was sitting at my desk in my office in bucolic Simsbury, CT. My sister-in-law who lives in Washington called (very uncharacteristically) to report that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. Then I talked to my mother (I think she called me). I felt sure that it was pilot error – sometimes planes flew into the Empire State Building, after all. But, of course, it became clear all too soon that something very different, something completely inexplicable at the time, was happening. Soon we called an administrative team meeting. Some faculty were watching TV, but we asked that students not do so. We decided to call an all-school meeting and tell the students what we knew, which was very little. I remember not even being able to pronounce Osama Bin Laden’s name. I reassured the students that we were very safe (the school even had its own water supply). We resumed classes, while quickly determining whether anyone had family members who might be affected. As it turned out, the only true possible casualty was a father who worked in the Pentagon. We learned within hours that he was fine. Meanwhile, my husband had flown on an American Airlines flight to LA the night before; I was quite sure he was fine, but I hadn’t talked to him since he had arrived. I was also worried about my sister who works in Manhattan. I don’t know when I learned that she was alright, but I do know I was in pretty regular contact with my mother. I did eventually talk to my husband. All this while trying, along with the rest of the country, to figure out what was going on. Plus I had to decide how to move forward with a school of approximately 200 students, about 60% of whom were boarders, and a number of those international students.
In the weeks and months that followed the attacks, as the leader of a school, I felt that it was critical to balance, sometime precariously, between the surge of patriotism and the impulse to focus on relationships over materialism and consumerism on the one hand, and the need to try to understand what could have motivated the terrorists – while holding true to our American value of religious tolerance. In many ways, the patriotism, the determination to defy the terrorists, to prove to the world that even a horrific attack could not bring us to our knees, was exhilarating. As a New Yorker, my heart went out to that great city, and I knew if anyone could rise above the devastation and extraordinary loss, they could. I applauded my students as they raised considerable sums for the families of the New York City firefighters who had died saving others. I wore my American flag pins with pride.
At the same time, I made sure that as a community and as individuals we avoided condemning all Muslims for the attacks. Our students naturally understood the importance of reaching across cultural and religious boundaries, and we all certainly learned more about Islam than we had known before. A student from Kuwait offered immeasurable help on that journey, both by actively educating us and by providing for us a moderate, human face of Islam.
I think this was the response of most liberal educational institutions at the time. The effort offered promise in the midst of such stunned sadness and loss.
As we look back ten years, many commentators asked the question, “Has America changed since 9/11?” Obviously, there are ways in which we have. Probably increased airport security stands out as the most commonly experienced result of 9/11. There have been changes in the structure of the government, in the way some agencies operate; we have been waging war for ten years, with wide ranging ramifications for the US military, for Iraq and Afghanistan, for the media and medicine, and most of all for the servicemen and women and their families, especially those who have died in those conflicts. Nor will the lives of families who lost loved ones on that day or of those who were seriously injured ever be the same. In no way do I want to minimize the impact of those changes, most especially for those families directly affected. However, for most of us, I don’t think much has changed.
In all the reflection and remembrance surrounding the 10th anniversary, it was Georgetown President Jack DeGioia’s remarks that rang most true for me. After remembering our losses as a nation and those specific to Georgetown, he recalled efforts similar to those we had made in a small Connecticut girls school:
We remember our collective recognition -- across university campuses, in churches, in synagogues, and in mosques -- of the urgent need to know each other better. We recall the religious services and the interfaith vigils that followed September 11, 2001, and the renewed commitment made by so many to interfaith dialogue and to sharing knowledge across all religious traditions.
It was in this knowledge -- with a deep respect for difference, yet a true understanding of the common goal among our faiths to create a world of justice, of peace, of freedom and of possibility -- that we began to take the first steps in the process of rebuilding.
Ten years later, we live in a world where a Florida pastor threatens to burn a Koran; where activists from outside New York City, the community that suffered the most at the hands of the terrorists, protested the building of a Mosque and cultural center a few blocks from the World Trade Center site; where a presidential candidate has to defend his Christianity in the face of persistent claims that he is a Muslim. To be sure, there were opposing voices in all these situations, but it was intolerance that dominated the airwaves.
In the ten years since that beautiful and horrifying September day, we have mourned the dead, both from the attacks and from the wars, we have erected monuments, chapels, and memorials. People have stitched their lives back together. We have learned to put our toiletries into a quart size Ziploc bags. We have also experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, an event that may, according to one commentator, have more long lasting effects than the terrorist attacks.
We have endured, but no more. We have not been able to sustain the heady commitment to a common purpose that galvanized us immediately after the attacks. We have not remained true to our immediate instinct to cherish our family and friends, to value relationships over things. And we have not met “the urgent need to know each other better.”
In fact, as a nation, we are mired in a culture of incivility, partisanship, and even intolerance that has been rare in our history. As has been true during other periods of extreme divisiveness, such as the period before the Civil War, we are prevented from moving forward, from realizing the great potential that is this extraordinary nation. This anniversary gives us an opportunity to reclaim the promise that the American spirit wrenched from those awful events, a promise we have since squandered, but which rests latent, waiting for our resolve, for our best selves to find.
As President DeGioia concluded, “… we are confident that by returning to the spirit of togetherness awakened in us that day, we will go forward as we did ten years ago: united in our remembrance, undivided in our respect, in our compassion and in our love.”
That would do some justice for all the lives lost.
