Coming Full Circle

Some thoughts on the somber occasion

When it happened I was still in pre-school, nothing really exceptional or noteworthy for someone my age. I and the rest of my classmates were picked up early, though at the time I didn’t really comprehend the gravity of what was then unfolding, not only the attacks themselves but the fact that my own father was potentially hurt or worse given that he was an employee at the NYMEX. Fortunately, he was only an eyewitness that day.

In the immediate months and years following what had occurred, I had only vaguely understood the prurience of the immense loss of life and property inflicted on that day, much less the subsequent political and social upheavals that had occurred since. Perhaps this was best illustrated when in my first years of elementary school I and some schoolmates would occasionally simulate the attacks with toy blocks in the time we had to ourselves during the day, not really thinking anything of it beyond a passing amusement for us kids. As I grew older, though, I gradually of course would absorb the prevailing mood of grief, indignation, and patriotism that accompanied the last weeks of Summer each year, and I and most other Americans had taken for granted. Oh, and of course, the obligatory vow to root out terrorism wherever and whenever it may exist.

By the time of my mid-adolescence I was well within the Internet libertarian/leftist rabbit hole, consuming content such as videos of Ron Paul during the 2008 Republican primary debates as well as snippets of Democracy Now! broadcasts. From this I came to interpret what had transpired of what was then a decade prior to be an expected if not deserved reaction to the United States’ behavior abroad, a position likely not at all unfamiliar to those who also find themselves in that corner of politics.

This perception was obviously naïve and foolish, probably motivated above all by teenage edginess. The perpetrators were not, as branded by some, “freedom fighters” waging righteous resistance against American imperialism, but ultimately products of U.S. global meddling. Bin Laden certainly had no qualms being the, albeit indirect, beneficiary of American assistance when it aided his objectives in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Further, far from being a principled critic of U.S. policy, OBL would change his tune on what exactly he took umbrage with in terms of the United States when it suited him, in one breath decrying American democracy as a farce masking the control of “the rich and the wealthy”, yet in another justifying attacks on American civilians on the basis that they, as citizens of a democratic society, bear responsibility for the actions of their government. Certainly not the reasoning of any Tocqueville or Hofstadter, in this writer’s humble opinion.

That being said, since that time I really haven’t changed any of my beliefs on American foreign and other areas of policy. If anything the actions of all levels of U.S. government since that date have reaffirmed the distinction between the the suspicion that the American state deserves and the love its people is owed, and at least on a personal level, have hardened a resolve to ensure the country lives up to its founding principles, in spite of any deceptive, malicious, or just straight up incompetent endeavors the state may undertake. There remains a kind of sublime horror watching people’s reactions in real time as they learned that the South Tower was hit, or watching people jumped to their deaths from burning skyscrapers. In one possibly comedic anecdote, a news broadcast the night prior features a story involving a high school football team having been exposed as partying with drugs, alcohol, and a stripper and the accompanying outrage from parents that it evoked. One wonders what came of this the next day, as well as an untold number of other events that were subsequently disrupted by the ensuing seemingly-tear in reality itself. Even taking into account the myriad sins committed both before and since the attacks cannot justify harming random people, who at worst only real “crime” was ignorance, a perennial issue not at all limited to one polity or another.

So, at twenty years I guess I really have come full circle in being just as speechless as I was as a four-year old hearing of what had taken place in Lower Manhattan. Those much more intelligent and articulate than I have already said most of what needs to be said. Now, at the very least, I have some bearings to navigate what then seemed like an unusual, but now nearly always appears to be a lawless and orderless world.