On September 11, 2001, six long years ago, like many people I watched my television with horror and disbelief as first passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center, and then the towers collapsed, like giant Jenga puzzles, one after the other. Before that collapse, I saw the flames and smoke spurting from those damaged skyscrapers and the people clinging to the outside of those wounded buildings like tiny ants. I even watched the long slow fall of those who decided death by falling 90 stories was preferable to being burned alive, before witnessing the shocking collapse into giant clouds of dust which buried so many we could not see in a tomb of massive debris.
What made that moment worse for me was that I feared I knew some of the doomed people in those towers. The law firm from which I had retired with my disability had its NYC office in WTC One, and I had worked closely with lawyers in another firm whose office was in WTC Two during the mid-nineties on a case for one of my major clients. I can still see many of their faces today, as I knew them then: young, vibrant people living in the greatest metropolis of our country. They were good lawyers, paralegals, secretaries and good people. None of them deserved to die. Seven of them in our firm’s New York office did, however. I never learned how many from the other firm may have met that same fate. I didn’t want to know.
Today, six years later, the memory of their deaths that day is a bitter one which still haunts me. I have watched as Republicans, politicians and ordinary party members alike, have perverted the memory of those who died to justify even greater atrocities. An illegal, preemptive war in Iraq that has killed hundreds of thousands and made millions of innocents refugees. The use torture as the official policy of our nation. The loss of habeas corpus. Warrantless surveillance of our neighbors, friends and families. The suppression and demonization of dissent. And a host of lies swallowed whole by a news media either too gullible, too enamored with access to power or too intimidated to tell the truth.
And always, always, the evocation of the dead is made without any acknowledgment, by those whose abuse their memory, of who they were, what they were, the lives they led, the people they left behind to mourn them. They have become a mere symbol, an icon for the right wing, a talking point to be trotted out by pundits and cynical politicians alike. Just another prop, a slogan to place on a bumper sticker, a by now standard reference in countless speeches by our President and his supporters to validate his failed policies of death and destruction, of war without end, and of justice, not delayed, but forever denied.
The greatest change in our country since 9/11/2001 has been the failure of those in power to remember these dead as real people, whose lives were as full of joy and sorrow as our own. Instead, our leaders and our media pundits and all the very “serious people” of Washington think tanks, who offer their ill-informed advice so freely on the op-ed pages of our newspapers and at conferences of “experts” and policy makers, have savaged their memory, turning the dead of 9/11 into the faceless “3000” who must only be employed to attack and besmirch those who question the murders and atrocities which are perpetrated in their names on a daily basis.
Our political and military leaders long ago abandoned justice for these poor souls, allowing Al Qaeda, the organization that murdered them, to regroup and thrive in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We cannot even claim that what we are doing in Iraq amounts to petty vengeance on their behalf despite General Petraeus’ best efforts to equate the small, disorganized band of terrorists who call themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq (and who account for an ever smaller amount of the violence in that war wracked country) into the same people who ordered the deaths of the people I knew. Their deaths and our memory of them have been made to serve a lie, and the political goals of men and women whose moral values are inversely proportional to the size of their ambitions.
In a sane universe, we would have hunted down and brought their killers to justice, not with indiscriminate bombing that kills thousands of innocents, but through the careful and diligent pursuit of these criminals by our armed forces and our law enforcement agencies, working in tandem with our allies in the region. Those who we captured would not have subjected to torture, making it impossible to ever bring them before the bar of justice, but would have been tried in a court of law for their crimes as required by our laws, our constitution and our legal traditions. Sadly, insanely, none of that has been done.
The deaths I, and you mourned, six years ago, have morphed into thousands, perhaps millions more, and it was our government that ordered these additional deaths, and our military which carried out these horrific orders. Six years, and the souls of those who died on September 11th have found no rest, no peace. Every day our memories of them are tortured, distorted and abused. Every day more misery is inflicted upon innocents, many of them children, many of those children now orphans, all in the name of the those whose lives were so cruelly taken from them six years ago.
We have not honored their memory by bringing out the best in our society in response to their deaths. Instead we have defiled it, by resorting to the worst impulses, propagating and implicitly sanctioning the most inhumane acts, and playing on the darkest, most hateful passions in our collective nature. 9/11 didn’t change everything, but everything it changed has been for the worse.
And that is the greatest tragedy of all.
