Divided We Fall

thoughts on 9/11 and the pandemic and what they have in common

The biggest problem I had that morning was getting my timestamp right on my blog posts. And then the planes hit and I forgot about the timestamps. I forgot about everything that came before 8:46 a.m. There was life before, and life after, and the life after was vastly different than the life before in many ways.

I left work and went home to be with my family. My father is retired NYFD and his friends and colleagues were still active. Two of my cousins were there. There was a lot of nail biting and anxiety and when word came that one of my father’s best friends did not make it out, we cried together. And once that floodgate opened, it was hard to stop it. I cried so much over the course of the day, and the days after. I didn’t know what else to do with myself, with my emotions. I wanted to scream. I cried instead.

A friend of the family lost his brother, a member of the NYPD bomb squad. There was a memorial service that felt like something out of a movie. Sharpshooters lined the roof of the church while police dogs sniffed the pews before the service. Bagpipes played, the surrounding streets were full of cops, someone sang “Ave Maria.” It all felt so surreal and when it was over and I got in my car, “Bullet the Blue Sky” was on the radio. Outside, is America. I turned to look back at the sharpshooters with their guns drawn. I cried.

My neighbors all put candles out on their doorsteps. A group got together every night in front of the elementary school to hold hands and sing. I went to the wake of my father’s friend and people wept and hugged and swore to tell their loved ones how cherished they are because death can come so suddenly, no warning. We watched tv all day and night, hoping for news of people being rescued, wanting to know what was going to happen next. We cried.

There were murmurs in the schoolyard when I dropped my son off. Hushed conversations about the Muslims amongst us. Whispers about people who up until then had been acquaintances we shared fifteen minutes of our morning with. There was anger and mistrust, there were people talking about revenge. They was a palpable anger that coincided with my overwhelming sadness. I didn’t want to hear about their anger, I didn’t want to hear their thoughts about our Muslim neighbors. I thought about all the candles on the front porches, of the people singing and hugging every night. I thought about the specter of “a nation together” that was being sold to us and I knew better.

For several days after I looked to the sky for planes, but there were none. The constant noise of flights taking off from or landing at JFK and LaGuardia were gone, and that haunted me. The silence of the skies was sharp and pronounced, reminding me every second of the day that things were not normal. I wondered if they would ever be normal again. The first day they opened the skies again, I was at my son’s Little League game, sitting in the bleachers working on a crossword puzzle. When we heard the unmistakable sound of an airplane, we all turned toward the sky, a nervous energy coursing through the stands. I held my breath as the plane passed by then went to sit in my car and cry.

I just wanted to feel normal. I was tired of feeling sad, of feeling fearful. I watched too much news. I spent a lot of time at my parents’ house, consoling my father, who was attending funeral after funeral. My anxiety ramped up. I couldn’t sleep. I was like thousands of other people who were experiencing all the same things. We weren’t alone. But we were. I couldn’t have a conversation with my neighbors that didn’t center on revenge and anger. I couldn’t talk to the other parents at school without hearing their newfound views on Muslims. I stayed inside a lot. I blogged. I watched tv. I cried.

I waited for that togetherness I was promised. I waited for the nation to come together as one. There were people reporting on that, acting as if it were so, but I didn’t see it. I saw a lot of people becoming paranoid. I saw a lot of rage. I remember thinking, if 3,000 dead people can’t unite us, what will?

And here we are, twenty years later, where a new tragedy has unfolded before us. The COVID pandemic has been raging for well over a year now. We are witness to a whole other level of tragedy. 600,000 dead Americans. We have stayed in our houses, we have lost jobs, lost loved ones, lost livelihoods. We have canceled weddings and had muted funerals. We have become anxious and depressed and yes, we have cried. A lot. None of this has brought us together. We are more divided now than ever, and now it’s a matter of life and death. The anti-vaxxers, the maskless among us have become loud and screechy, drowning out our pleas that they take this virus seriously. They have politicized a pandemic.

Some people have said we need another national tragedy to bring us together, but what the hell is 600,000 dead people if not a tragedy? I’m heartbroken that even this has failed to unite us, to move us forward as a nation. I keep thinking back to those days after 9/11, when I was nervous and sad and looking for a sign that we were in this together, that we’d rise above and become stronger for it. But I don’t believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, not anymore. It just disheartens you, it wears you down, it erodes your sense of well being. I feel now like I felt in 2001, a hopelessness pervading my morale. You can’t reason with angry people. You can’t join hands with someone who doesn’t care if you live or die. We can light all the candles we want, and come out of our homes and applaud at 7pm, we can hold vigils and parades and it’s all just so superficial. Underneath, we’re doing battle. As long as there are people for whom empathy is a foreign concept, we will be doing battle.

Some nights I just sit on my couch and cry. It’s part of being depressed, but it’s part of everything going on. As with 9/11, I am living very close to the emotional surface, I have no defense mechanisms left. They’ve been shattered. I thought in twenty years we would learn something, that things would be different. But here we are, divided, taking sides. Some of us only want what’s good for America. And some of us think we know what that is. As always, those things are not the same.

Twenty years. We had a lot of time to learn from the experience. But we got war and xenophobia and a nation that’s divided. I want to find the good things. I want to be hopeful. But every time I see another “my kid my choice” parent who won’t protect their child and everyone around them, every time I hear from an anti-vaxxer, every time I pass my neighbor’s “Trump Won!” flag, I feel hopeless. All I want is for us to take care of each other, to be empathic, altruistic. A nation that takes care of its own is one that thrives. We are not thriving. We are rotting. I don’t know what it will take to change that, I just know that large scale tragedies don’t do it and we certainly don’t need another one, anyhow.

All you can do is try to put out some goodness into the world yourself. Be kind. Do good. Don’t wait for something to happen to tell people you love them. If we can’t get along as a nation, if we can’t come together over the deaths of thousands, at least we can do right by those we love. It’s something.