9|11 - Five years later
I remember sitting in my old director’s office, discussing the year’s communications strategy, when one of our program’s Fellows came into the room to tell us that the Twin Towers were on fire. Everyone in the office sat together in the kitchen, watching the first few hours of 9/11/01 on the ceiling-mounted television. Then work closed, and I stepped outside to meet Tina, the streets of Washington, D.C. clogged with cars.
The rest is a blur. I nearly got into a fist fight with a guy in Steed Park over my dog. Gay men gathered on 17th Street restaurant patios, sobbing. The city of Washington was quiet, despite so many people wandering around outside. And it was so crisp and clear, so beautiful. A fine day, really. Except for the unending news reports and that faint plume of smoke off in the direction of Arlington.
There are other images — television images — that come to mind. Bush with a bull horn at Ground Zero. Calls for unity, not just from around the country, but also from around the world. An overwhelming call for war against those who did us harm, a call that was heeded, but not fulfilled in the way we’d all hoped.
How things have changed since then. Who would have thought that five years later, America’s unprecedented national unity would be torn apart by the Republican administration that sought to use the largely blue-state tragedy of 9/11 to consolidate and make permanent its hold on all three branches of government. That Democrats who tried to have a say in the decisions of the post-9/11 response would be silenced, demonized, marginalized. That even a moderate like me, someone who has never identified with the “bleeding heart” liberals of the world, has taken the mantle of “liberal” for better or worse, because of things the President and his allies have said about Democrats on television.
Things could have gone so much differently. But to me, 9/11 is the day the dream ended, the day America was transformed from a free society into something I barely recognize. Fear guides so much of our government’s public policy that it’s hard to believe that just six years ago people still cared about Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and her stained blue dress. That a President lying about a sexual encounter was ever thought to be a threat to the nation’s security. How naive we were then. How naive we all still are.
