Here we are, ten years later. This year I’m in Washington, and not in New York as I was on that September 11th. It’s been a week of memorials, remembrances and special editions (none better, I should add, than New York Magazine. I bought a subscription because of it). But in terms of flashing back to that time, nothing did a better job than the latest ‘serious’ but ‘unconfirmed’ threat. So how is the town feeling today? I went down to Dupont Circle and the White House to see for myself.
AT Dupont Circle, if anyone is afraid they are not showing it. The locals are out (or as local as anyone on this side of the Capitol is) in full force. It’s hot, and everyone’s taking advantage of the last hot day of summer. The Homosexual Presidium has officially waved the no-white-after-Labor-Day rule. Shorts and t-shirts are being pulled out of the closet for the last time. White hipsters and guppies (that’d be gay yuppies) are playing chess against the veteran black players. A young man in a Fedora is actually playing three-cup shuffle, god bless gullible tourists. The National Association of Broadcasters has their memorial flag out just south of the circle:
AT the White House, the scene is quite normal. Well, as normal as it can be around the White House after September 11th. An anti-AIDS rally is waiting to happen, and reggae music blares from the empty state, surrounded by some idle volunteers. A Russian tour group listens to the usual tour guide spiel (I imagine, my Russian is somewhat rusty considering I never learned any). Walking down the sidewalk in front of the White House fence takes forever due to all the families taking photos (though it’s nice to think how many family photo albums I now appear in). The woman who’s been camped out on Pennsylvania Avenue protesting nukes is still there:
Another day should do it.
The cops on bikes do seem to be passing by more often. But there are no troops, no machine guns. No extra bulwarks or concrete barriers. Nixon had the White House lined with busses when the hippies staged a rally by the Washington Monument, but today looks like we’ve calmed down a bit. But we really haven’t. Our physical security stabilized at a new normal in the months and years after the attack, but physiologically we are still fragile.
I’ll give you an example, from my trip in the Metro going to downtown DC. In the station, Janet Napolitano’s voice booms through the concrete cavern warning people that if they see something, they should say something. I will give Giuliani his due on that phrase. We make it about ten feet before stopping - the conductor ‘thinks’ we’re single tracing to Dupont. We move some more so that we’re fully in the tunnel and stop for a good solid five minutes. The Metro being fucked up, especially on the weekend, is par for the course in DC. But I can’t deny a light sense of unease. You’d like to imagine that if you were to die in an attack or horrible accident, you would die doing something brave and noble. Not sitting in a thirty-year-old Metro car. I was distracted by two young women discussing, and disproving of an add on the train car by an atheist group. It turned out to be run of the mill weekend track work (planned, so of course the conductor didn’t know what was happening).
For a minute though there was that sense of unease. And that is the lingering legacy of that day in ten years ago. Going back to today’s ‘unconfirmed’ threat, on September 9th I got a letter under the door in my apartment from the building’s management. It read in part: “The US has received specific and credible intelligence that a terrorist group may be pursuing a plot to carry out car or truck bombings…We have absolutely no information regarding any possible targeted sites, including our building.” And there is that unease in a nutshell. An unease that motivates a building manager to see the need to alert residents of a mid-size apartment building that we probably aren’t a target of an international terrorist cell. It would be laughable if not for the small level of comfort that it actually does provide.
That fear is still there. As a child I was always confounded that my mother was always so deeply affected by that infamous photo from the Kent State shooting. She was a college student at the time, at a neighboring college in Ohio. The shootings, and any visual reminder of them, got to her decades later as if she were hearing about them for the first time again. I understand feeling now. I have made a deliberate attempt these past ten years to avoid the pictures and videos from the attack, but on this tenth anniversary I felt it was time to confront them again. And man, have they gotten to me. Watching the second plane hit the towers still fills me with a sense of dread and fear, like my world is coming apart. I know it’s coming, but the inevitability only seems to make it worse.
The unease has not gone away. I know we talk about how we should ‘never forget,’ and nor should we forget about these attacks. But that unease should be relegated to a memory, not a present feeling
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