Fuck 9-11

Fuck 9-11
by Isonomist
09/10/2010, 9:56 AM #

I was standing on 5th Avenue with a crowd of New Yorkers from all walks of life,watching the biggest buildings in one of the biggest cities in the world burn like candles. No one knew what had happened for the first hour or so. Once we knew it wasn't an accident and the city began shutting down like a fort under seige, we began dialing family and friends and the schools where our kids were trapped by untrained administrators, getting dial tones and terrifyingly calm computer voices telling us the lines were down. No one panicked, you can see the footage. We did what we had to do. Boats poured across the Hudson from New Jersey to ferry people out of harm's way. People put their kids' schoolmates up for the night, companies closed, neighborhoods were blocked off, there were lines wrapped around the hospitals to donate blood.

The next day the stench was unbearable and unavoidable. I'm reminded of it today because down the block from my office, a restaurant is on fire as I type. The sickening smell of burning meat and building materials and ozone is all too familiar. We were out on the streets, collecting things to donate to the rescue responders. There were no trucks, no food or supplies could come into the city then. We were in lockdown. On my street, rescue workers walked from store to store looking for bottled water and food, covered to their hips in thick grey dust.

Within days, when the city was running again, but the fire was still burning and ash floating all over us, we went back to work. My route took me past the armory, the local operations for the rescue effort. On the walls of buildings surrounding it, were photos of the missing, smiling out at the camera. I felt myself in the very shoes of the family member or friend who had taken that photo in a moment of joy, and now had to xerox it onto a leaflet begging to know if this happy face still lived. I cried as I passed this part of town. We cried at my office. My kids wore paper dust masks to go outside. The dust and ash blew through our windows. The stench didn't abate for months.

It was March before the fires were completely out. And years before the hole was emptied. New Yorkers flinched at the sight of low flying planes. We stayed away from the site, or trepidatiously peered, in full knowledge that we were walking on sidewalks strewn with the ash of our neighbors' remains. We were angry at photos of tourists taking photos of the site with smiles on their faces. Fuck them. We tried to be tolerant when family members visited and wanted to see it. Like asking to see fresh scars from some near fatal collision.

The annual 9-11 ceremonies were tasteful, heartbreaking, and at some point, too boring to watch. When 9-11 was renamed Patriots' Day, when politicians started using it to scare people into voting for them, when radio talk show hosts and cheap tin pastors started using it to boost their audience ratings, when people who had never been there and had no right to wrap themselves in it began doing so, 9-11 ceased to be sacred. Now it's just another insincere glow in the dark plastic trinket holiday, co-opted by people who say we, who lived this horror, are not real Americans. The people who died on 9-11, and the people who ran in to save them, we're not patriots. The people who died together: Arab, Hindu, Christian, Jew, European, African, Latin, Asian, Indian--every strain of human bloodline, every religion or lack thereof-- and the people who ran in to save them, recover their bodies, and mourn them, all of us, are now the sworn enemies of the people who hold 9-11 up as their rallying cry. We're atheist godless, idol worshiping terorrist lefty liberal New York assholes who hate the constitution and the country and our troops and real Americans, and unborn babies and fuck you.


I'm done with that three ring circus.

KNOW YOUR ENEMIES, AMERICA

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Subject: KNOW YOUR ENEMIES, AMERICA !
From: James Wilson
Date: Sep 13 2001 10:03AM

Hal Lindsey 3:11 PM EST -- The Battle of America has begun! So be it! As I have warned many times, the United States has come under attack by the combined terrorist forces of Islam. If you want to know who is responsible and what we are fighting, just look at the response of the average Muslim in the streets of their cities. They danced for joy in their streets as the news of thousands of Americans killed in New York and Washington DC broke.

A Few Minutes Post-9/11

Subject: Fear is not my Daily Bread
From: Neill Hamilton
Date: Sep 11 2001 8:48AM

Stuff and nonsense. Fear is only your daily bread if you choose to eat it. No one should make any silly judgments for a good 48 hours. No doubt America is filled with yammerheads who will bay and cry for other innocents to be killed in exchange for our dead innocents. Americans don't, or shouldn't, commit foul deeds to trade for foul deeds. Bury and mourn the dead, take a close look at who rejoices and who joins us in mourning, rebuild and repair. Only then after a steady and thoughtful hunt for the guilty and weighing of evidence should anyone begin to decide what to do. Tommorrow the sun rises for most of us, and the Post Office will be open, coffee will need to be brewed, etc.

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Subject: but burying the dead won't be quaint
From: tom r.
Date: Sep 11 2001 9:21AM

I don't think that we'll go back to discussing lockboxes or education budgets with the same business-as-usual tenor tommorrow though. Like 7 December 1941, 11 September 2001 will go down as a "day that will live in infamy". A voice for this new reality for today's dead from Victorian England:

extracted from "Dover Beach"

... for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold
1867

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Subject: RE: but burying the dead won't be quaint
From: LT
Date: Sep 11 2001 9:35AM

Thanks. Your lovely paragraph on Dylan Thomas a while back led me to start reading his poetry for the first time in at least 15 years.

I was thinking of Yeats myself. The Second Coming, and The Stare's Nest by My Window, especially

We have fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love

I feel that "all is changed, changed utterly." I am steeling myself for the probability that I know someone who was a victim of this. I am also hoping that fraysters of all political persuasions are safe, and that so are the ones closest to their hearts. I am happy my husband changed his flight to arrive on yesterday rather than Tuesday or Wednesday, so he isn't trapped in Europe, although there are worse things...I wat

Right now the other stuff seems trivial.

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Subject: I was thinking of Yeats also
From: tom r.
Date: Sep 11 2001 9:43AM

The lines from "The Second Coming":

...
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
...


are possibly applicable also. We'll have to see about our national leaders. You have to give that to Churchill and FDR, at least they didn't lack conviction.

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Subject: RE: I was thinking of Yeats also
From: LT
Date: Sep 11 2001 10:39AM

Yes, I believe the US and Britain were very fortuntate in their leaders, although neither man was perfect, they were the right people at the right time. I hope for conviction, wisdom and the best response possible to this horror.