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Volume IV, No. 1/November 2001
Reflections After September 11th
By Kevin Bowen
Many of us at the Joiner Center witnessed the events of September 11th just the way many other Americans did. Someone in the office heard word on an elevator of a plane crashing into buildings in New York. A radio was turned on. The news of the first plane crashing into the World Trade filtered through the offices. Slowly, people emerged to hear the startled announcement of the crash of the second plane. Within minutes we gathered to watch the first images of the burning glass towers, listen to the report of another plane plowing into the Pentagon. Moments later we saw the first of the two towers collapse. We were just beginning to fathom the devastation, when the second tower fell, and smoke and ash and dust billowed through the streets.
It is a cliché now to say that everything changed in that moment. But everything did change for the families of the victims caught in the towers and planes. As for the rest of us, suffice it to say that as the reality of the attacks set in, many of us found ourselves reaching for phones trying to locate families and loved ones. In Boston, where two of the flights originated, offices emptied, roads clogged with cars filled with people trying to get to homes or schools. It was not panic. It was a natural reaction to the realization of being located in a war zone.
In the hours that followed many tried contacting family and friends in Washington and New York. Circuits were more often down than up as we waited to hear a voice. Calls and e-mails came in from near and far. All night and into the next day we watched the footage on the networks, watched the catastrophe replayed from most every angle, half-mesmerized, as if only by seeing the act repeated over and over again could we overcome the weight of our denial.
In the next days, more and more, our focus turned to present reality, to images of triage stations, medics, fire, police, EMT’s waiting for the firefighters to put out the flames, so rescue could begin. We saw the courage of the men and women wrestling with mangled steel and the glass while fires still burned and parts of buildings fell. We thought of the firefighters, the police, the EMT’s who lost their lives rushing in. Those who had been in war zones previously might have found the scene reminiscent, but nothing ever on this scale before.
We heard the stories of the last calls of passengers. Elected leaders spoke of a state of war, the need to draft appropriate measures so the President could fight a war against terrorism. Well-known faces people appeared at ground zero. We began to see the obituaries in the papers, to read the names, see the faces. Many rallied to give blood and raise money for the victims’ families, yet there were assaults on Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs. At local bookstores, shelves on the subject of Islam were emptied.
Religion, though, we recognized was not the villain. Still, there was the closing of ranks, the hardening of lines, the sorting out of friends and foes. References to Pearl Harbor brought back memories of a time when the country rallied together, but it brought out memories of detention camps for many. Some questioned the sufficiency of the explanations given for the attack- the suggestion that we were being attacked because people hated our freedoms, what our way of life had come to represent. Others questioned the solution offered: the bombing of a country that had been bombed for the past twenty years; the placing of American troops into a situation that past experience had shown untenable terrain. When men and women tried to raise these issues in public, at times they found themselves dismissed by the media as old and irrelevant voices from movements to stop the Vietnam War (this, in spite of the fact that the men prosecuting current policy earned their stripes in managing the same conflict) or made objects of contempt, opprobrium or ridicule.
In early October, three weeks after the attacks, Senator John Kerry held a Town Meeting in Dorchester at Florian Hall. About two hundred people attended. In the crowd were teachers, union workers, firefighters, local activists, veteran activists and leaders. They were people of all shades of colors, ethic backgrounds, religions. There were people who already had their sons on the ground in the war. When it came time for questions, one after another, men and women stood to express their concerns. They spoke of their concern for the refugees in Afghanistan; of their doubt and worry at the effectiveness and harm of the bombing; of their concern for the safety of U.S. troops, for the plight of the victims’ families; they spoke of the need for bills to protect firefighters, airline workers, returning veterans, to increase foreign aid (less than .1% of the federal budget), to protect civil liberties in a time of heightened vigilance.
The tone of the meeting spoke of a level of awareness and civility that all present were afraid of losing in the rush of events after September 11th. The tone spoke of a wish to look deeply to causes and consequences in the aftermath of September 11th , to question whether military solutions can redress the political and social conditions that more and more are the occasions of war and acts of terrorism, to underline how a history of walking away after military interventions has been a formula for disaster.
The question remained, though, how to fight this new kind of war. How were we to anticipate, measure, and address the new threats that this new kind of war might bring? My son and his best friend, both ten years old, came with me to the town meeting; they never got to ask their question. It was about anthrax: what was it; what could we do about it; should they be worried?
I am not sure what Senator Kerry could have answered. If one thing is certain it is that no one has the answers yet. Yet finding the right answers depends in part on asking the right questions. This issue of our newsletter was in preparation before the events of September 11th. Its contents are formed by some of the problematic legacies the 21st century has inherited, the legacies of conflicts in places such as Korea, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cuba, Africa. With winter coming on in Afghanistan, with the growth of a huge refugee crisis, with the coming of the holy days of Ramadan, it would be well to keep some of these legacies in mind as we pose questions and look for answers.
Kevin Bowen is the director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences
