I was in seventh grade in 2001. Old enough to remember and to understand what had happened to me, as a part of America, on 9/11. We were supposed to be taking a quiz in my English class, but we turned on the TV just before the second plane hit, and, in the way of middle schoolers, we spent the rest of the day talking about the morning and about the students who had been pulled out of school because they had family from up that way. I remember walking from class to class talking about a friend of ours who had gone home and realizing that this wasn't an event that had happened to somebody else far away. This was an event that happened to us. All of us. In the weeks after, I remember ribbons and fundraisers and images, inspiration drawn from the hurt.
Now, fourteen years later, I'm in New York City on 9/11, about to leave the country for a year, and I wonder what it means to be an American, to be a part of that us. For a nation of people with a tragedy so close in our rearview mirror, we sure have reacted to it differently, separately. We've always been a melting pot with different people and different views and different thoughts and that can be beautiful, but we've also watched the unity we had as a nation in the days after 9/11 fall away to leave us here, the most polarized we've ever been. With that kind of division, what does it mean to be an American anymore? To fight for or against wars, guns, the right to defend yourself? To strive for peace, prosperity, and happiness at any cost? At a responsible cost? To protect liberty? To protect justice? To be American, do you have to be unremittingly proud of your country and everyone in it?
Everyone, we got through the 9/11 terror attacks. We cleared away debris and rebuilt. It didn't break our spirits, because how could it? We are indeed a nation of strength, even amidst our pain. I only wish that we always used our strength to help and not to harm. To build and not to break. And now, years later, we can pause and remember and mourn, but the honking and the voices and the footsteps of the world around me tell me that we can also move forward. We can allow space to remember, to never forget, but we can also carry on and do wonderful things in memory of those lost.
I think it's important to ask- Have we done wonderful things? Necessary things? How did we allow tragedy to shape us over the past fourteen years? We need to think about this, feel it mix in our hearts with all the other emotions this time can bring to us, and then we need to have a productive discussion about it. Because that discussion, to me, is what makes us American. The idea that we can question and think and push for what we think is right and still exist in the same country, fly the same flag as someone who believes the polar opposite from us, is the defining American idea in my mind.
I sat behind a 9/11 Truther on my flight to New York yesterday and though all I experienced was abject disbelief at the time, today I can appreciate that we live in a place were he could be heard, listened to, even, and still walk away in safety. Yes, he was an older middle class white male, and yes, I know that realistically all those things matter, but it is still astounding to me that we can permit such a difference of ideas.
There's no such thing as perfect freedom. I know that. We all compromise a little on our ability to do whatever we want in order to be able to live together, to build things together, to become better people. It's not an easy process to find the line of reasonable compromise and it's made even more difficult by our biases and our hatreds, the baggage we walk into the room with. Looking at history, it's hard to completely believe that even trying to live with other humans is in fact a good thing.
But if anybody can do it, if anybody can figure out how to make the best world possible, where we live with others and the planet in harmony, I gotta give it to the country that guarantees freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, of protest. We've got freedom of discovery and discussion.
I can get behind that. I can be proud of that American idea.
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