Twilight's Last Gleaming: The Role of 9/11

A photo montage with a portrait of each 9/11 victim

I lost no one on 9/11/01, but every year I try to read about some of the victims — who they were, where they were in their lives, who they left behind. There was the firefighter with the older-model Wagoneer that was constantly breaking down. The EMT who should've had a day off, but turned on his heel to run back into the first smoking tower. The bright-eyed middle-schooler on her first flight to another city. 9/11 gave us a new "Spoon River" anthology of lives, cruelly interrupted .

My father was in New York City that day with a Chinese film crew, and I had three or four friends traveling in commercial jetliners like the one that cartwheeled and vaporized over a Pennsylvania farm field. My family and I tried all day to reach Dad, were finally relieved to learn he was unharmed. My loved ones were inconvenienced by 9/11, and their safe return enables me to feel a level of empathy for those who did lose loved ones that day. For several hours, that possibility had been ours. 9/11 refreshed a public component in our sense of empathy: caring for the plight of strangers is not a bizarre thing to do.

Empathy being a vital part of public grief

There are diverse attitudes about 9/11, one being that only New Yorkers have any right to mourn it, since the attack epicenter was in their neck of the woods (hello! Pentagon on line one). Another deplored our day of "grief porn," that a nationwide mourning of 9/11 is somehow maudlin and self-indulgent.

Neither works. Far more than American lives were lost that day, and far more than American lives were in jeopardy during the hours of uncertainty that followed. More than 90 countries lost people in the attacks. 9/11 was a global event that happened on American soil.

Our nation, among these 90 others, experienced butchery on a massive scale, and for a while we engaged in an unprecedented sense of community and compassion. Then it devolved to polarized discourse, fingerpointing, spitefulness, and all levels of social, political, and emotional violence. The same Congressional chamber that saw Americans rising to their feet to applaud the widows of Flight 93's "Let's Roll" heroes also saw, years later, Congressman Joe Wilson screaming "You lie!" to a newly elected POTUS. 

Today incivility characterizes our most ordinary dealings with one another, from Little League ballfields and mall parking lots, to workplaces and groceries. 

And yet when we applauded the Flight 93 widows, nobody stopped to ask if their dead husbands had been liberals or conservatives.

The role of public grief

So ... back to the role and value of public grief (that it's public only means it's widespread, not histrionic) —

Grief enables the living to try and understand (if not accept) the breadth and depth of their bereavement. It helps us to reflect on those lost, and what they mean to us. It gives us an opportunity to honor memories, whether one does that by laughing over anecdotes, burning incense in a place of worship, making a pencil rubbing off an engraved memorial, or buying a tacky souvenir from the 9/11 museum shop.

The more abrupt and violent the loss, the more unpredictable the grieving process. To those who have lost a great deal in the cruelest manner, a day of public grief gives the rest of us a chance to stand with them, to offer care and support, even if they are strangers. That's being humane, not "pornographic."

Self-ordained for what?

As a culture, this nation has gotten good at self-ordination based on sentiment versus fact. We're skilled at identifying how we're entitled. Some of it's been to the positive, and some has been gasbag punditry and blatant hatemongering. 

Over a decade later, despite the violence that was done to us on 9/11, we've become a more violent nation. And we've yet to find the common ground we share with other nations much less among ourselves: currently we're more invested in being morally triumphant than in finding unprecedented solutions. And we'll get no closer to finding common ground by telling others their most heartfelt emotions — such as grief — have no place in public discourse (Sandy Hook parents). 

Lively debate is one thing, but to believe you can make someone else change their moral vision is a presumption of correctness that's wrong for the times in which we live. Don't forget, it was moral intractability that drove the terrorists to act as they did.


So what?

9/11, as it turns out, didn't bring us closer to agree but to disagree. Its consequence was — and remains — our greatest opportunity, because in disagreement we find new ideas, even fresh collaborations. The same convictions that got us here won't be the thinking we need to get us out — and over — to better solutions. 9/11 awakened those who'd been spiritually dormant, and galvanized those already engaged in social justice and geopolitical accords.

Twilight's last gleaming? If we can't do compassion, can we at least try civility?