On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, my family did our best to celebrate.
It was my mother’s 72nd birthday and she’d just moved near us after the death of my stepfather in Arizona. So we went to a restaurant as planned, and sat there in surreal, gloomy isolation, the only customers in the place.
She’s 82 today. We took her out to dinner again, but you can bet it was on Friday the 9th this year.
That first birthday bash wasn’t the only miscalculation I made. I initially believed Colin Powell’s pitch on weapons of mass destruction and supported the most boneheaded war in American history.
Oops. I forgot that “the first casualty in war is truth.” (See the initial reports on Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc.)
It’s been a rough decade or, I’d guesstimate, a rough 13 years. There was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and impeachment fiasco, the dot.com collapse, the Bush-Gore election imbroglio, 9-11 and its economic aftershock, two wars, the housing bubble and bank collapse, ineffectual tax cuts, disastrous deficit spending, Hurricane Katrina, a blitz of blizzard-tornado-drought-flood this year (accompanied by climate change denial, of course), and completely dysfunctional politics.
There was even an East Coast earthquake, for crying out loud. And a truly disastrous one in Japan.
Why did Bush and the Republicans insist on tax cuts amid a second war? Why did Obama and the Democrats spend their energy on health reform when millions were going unemployed? Why can neither party begin the more pressing things needing doing: revision of a ridiculously unfair tax code, restoring solvency and confidence in Social Security and Medicare, repairing our own infrastructure instead of those overseas like Afghanistan, and making us more competitive by improving schools?
As a journalist I know we in the media are obsessed with anniversaries, the gloomier the better: Pearl Harbor was the previous favorite. I’ve read with interest much of the 9/11 coverage, including an issue of the New Yorker depressing enough to promote suicide. The editorial meetings must have been festooned in black crepe.
Most retrospectives have been a litany of a decade of mistakes, reminding me of the Spanish Empire’s squandering of its New World gold and silver on pointless adventures instead of investment at home.
We’re in such desperate need for a reset that maybe my family’s abortive birthday fest ten years ago wasn’t entirely wrongheaded. We’re stuck in a malaise that reminds me of the late 1970s, with no Gipper in sight.
Personally, I’ve had a pretty good decade. Since 9/11 I’ve had the fortune to publish nine books and contribute to several more, teach and advise a student magazine at the college level, welcome four grandchildren to the world, write journalism, and travel widely, including to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt for book research.
I haven’t felt very terrorized. Most Muslims are amazingly friendly and generous, I learned. But Israeli airport security has an intelligence that puts our dumb, surly, TSA approach to shame.
I’ve had the advantage of living 3,000 miles from the twin towers. My book agent in 2001 was one of countless New Yorkers truly traumatized in a way I couldn’t really comprehend. That Manhattan stress disorder continues to influence coverage today.
It’s great to learn from mistakes, but I wish our anniversaries could occasionally be a little more upbeat. Here’s some I bet you can’t guess: October 19, April 9, May 8, September 2, August 18, July 2.
They are, in order, the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown, effectively winning the American Revolution, the surrender of Lee to Grant, ending the worst war in American history, ratification in Berlin of the Nazi surrender, signing of the Japanese surrender ending World War II, ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the vote, signing of the Civil Rights Act.
But that’s not how Americans remember.
Nov. 11, Veteran’s Day? End of World War I. Most of my college students didn’t know the holiday had any connection to a good day in history.
My mother’s birthday will always feel a little sad, I’m afraid, because of the brutal national tragedy. But I also hope we can mourn, declare victory, and move on from 9/11 to fix our own country.
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Hear, hear! The very reason I refrained from watching the endless media coverage over the weekend. Events today have created a glum aura everywhere, so why contribute to it with such black remembrances? Good grief. We need to find things to make us laugh and hope for better times.