To those who lost, we can only remember, and be calm. But calm is balm, misleading and temporary because, as we all know, a calm surface does not mean an ocean is any less powerful, or a hot breeze cannot grow into a hurricane force again. The earth quakes, the sky and the ocean bring devastation as well as beauty, beautiful streams can flood with massive devastation.
We remember that horrible storm, recovery and rebuilding. We remember an event that brought two towers, and all of us, down to earth, to reality and to recognition that evil, danger and powerful forces never go away. They hide away and rest when we all think it is calm. What is scariest of all about this new evil threat is that its believers feel they are divinely inspired and the rest of us are evil. Extremism rooted in or mixed with religious zealotry is a weapon that is difficult to detect, stop or eliminate – and it remains, for me, so very difficult to understand.
Ten years ago deadly rage carried by 4 planes inflicted unspeakable horror – but it was not a turning point; instead it was a launching point for retribution that continues to this day with expensive disappointing results. Evils of an ideology not identified with country, place, uniform or leader – embodying hatred for hatred sake, unfathomable ten years ago is now most often a footnote on the news of someone being rooted out of a cave somewhere or planting an improvised bomb somewhere. We’ve become normalized by it as just one more form of death, destruction and risk to living in dangerous places.
Ten years ago we all had a reminder of what is now so obvious – there is no such thing as a safe place, there is no one who is safe and there is no obvious way to recognize a perpetrator as looking different from an innocent.
We’ve gone from the jet-age, through the cold-war and now we are in the terror age. I think it is time for a new age to arrive, a fresh epoch of calm, an emerging era of humanity but I can only wish and hope.
My inconvenience (having a trip cancelled because planes were not flying was so small as to not matter), wasn’t a trip to some vacation spot or a short hop to some place for work or play – it was a trip to New York and Washington DC, a trip to start on Sept. 12th, 2001. A trip never taken.
I remember so vividly my next trip to New York; it was three months later and I felt as safe as I’d ever felt there. Police on every corner, someone in a uniform at every turn and signing in just to enter a building for a meeting was a shockingly stark, but the soldiers sporting machine guns as I strode from the plane to the terminal at LaGuardia airport are as vivid today. After a busy day I returned to my hotel room to find, laying on the freshly made bed, a copy of a letter given to all hotel guests at that time, from Mayor Guiliani, saying thank you for coming, thank you for coming back.
Like any other substantially unaffected bystander, I cannot imagine the magnitude of the grief, pain and loss of those who died and of their families left behind who cannot ever un-change their lives or of any New Yorker who felt their home under siege, their lives endangered and any feeling of calm and safety destroyed.
For right now, for this moment, calm has come to much of the world, but not peace. Calm prevails over much of it, but not all of it.
On a day when we remember and commemorate tragedies of this date ten years ago, it is difficult to imagine that calm has come from such destruction, tragic loss and massive wounds inflicted on iconic symbols of a country. We’ve all heard about it and read about it so many times one might think, by now, that we might understand it. I still don’t.
Mark Kolke
309,620
