Where my mind took me today...
Today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. I chose to journal in gray today. It was such a horrible time and our country hasn't been the same since. I do believe that the children of that time period were permanently scarred. We were all traumatized. We were all changed. But for the children too young for words, their worlds changed abruptly overnight with no explanation. They were alive when it happened, but they only have memories of their parents telling them the story every year. They have no memories of a pre-9/11 world, but they were raised in the midst of their parents lives and the entire world being rocked by it. They do not remember a time when Homeland Security was a new concept. But their parents brought them to school/daycare in an anxious haze, listening to the news to find out if the day was Yellow...Orange...or, perish the thought, Red. We didn't even know what that meant. We just knew it was terrifying. Too terrifying to imagine. But before 9/11, so we also could have never imagined was the thought of planes - everyday commercial airlines - crashing into buildings that were an iconic part of the American landscape. Not one, not two, but three planes crashed into buildings. Before 9/11, no one ever imagined watching - in real life, in real time - the New York City skyline crumble right before their eyes. Before 9/11, no one could imagine such catastrophic loss and untamable fear of a faceless enemy. Before 9/11, the faces of brown men with beards, kufis or turbans, jalabiyas, or women in hijabs did not ignite terror in the hearts, minds, faces, words of passersby. Before 9/11, it did not feel unsafe to be American. At least not IN America. Even before 9/11, there were regions across the globe whose inhabitants have no memories of NOT living in fear of or mutual enmity between neighbors. Before 9/11, our lives were not consumed with fear. After 9/11, there was a fundamental shift in America's reality and in her collective consciousness. In the days that followed, there was an all-consuming grief. We mourned the lives lost...a list that grew longer daily. As the days passed, any hope of survivors diminished. After 9/11, whether consciously or not, we mourned the loss of our sense of security and of life as we knew it. We lived in fear of being caught unawares again. Where would they strike next? What would be the site of the next mass grave? In the days that followed, we were united in our shared grief, our shared fear, our shared dwindling hope. American flags were everywhere - stickers on every car, on every porch, in every window. A silent acknowledgement of this shared trauma, a silent nod that you are together through this pain, a silent hug that conveys a message that words could never capture. The flag was the supportive presence provided to families at a deathbed of a loved one, at the funeral, at the gravesite - that presence that says "all I can do is be with you through this." The flag was the way we could all show our love and support for one another. And in the midst of our uncertainty, sadness, fear, and confusion, our children continued to want to play, needed to be fed, saw their friends, and sat with their parents who could not seem to look to away from the TV until is seemed they could not look at it any longer. They watched their parents faces become clouded, distant, pained. Without warning or reason, their parents would scoop them up, squeezing them in a tight hug, and weep. Without warning or reason, their parents would snap at them to leave them alone, to be quiet, to get out of the way because the President was talking. In the weeks that followed 9/11, our sadness and fear became mired by anger. Our helplessness manifested itself in a restlessness: we needed to do something. Our babies and toddlers watched as we thirsted for retaliation; we needed to blame someone...anyone. We needed to relieve ourselves of this discomfort by transferring it to someone/something responsible for this mass destruction of life, property, and peace. In the months that followed 9/11, anyone who looked Arab, had an Arab-sounding name, was a woman with her head covered became the target of the country's vitriol...all the anger, sadness, and helplessness that they were desperate to free themselves from.The country continued to feel afraid, but no longer unified. We began to fear one another. We feared the unfamiliar and the unknown. The adults in the world did not know how to cope with the enormity of what we were feeling, of what we had lost, and of so many unanswered questions. It would border on willful ignorance if we did not acknowledge that this affected how children experienced the world, how it affected our parenting, how it affected our teaching, how it affected our lives. My son was 10 days shy of turning 3 on 9/11. I was in grad school at LSU. When I dropped him off at daycare that morning, I think the first plane had already crashed. I know something had happened because I was glued to the radio the whole way to campus, my unease growing. By the time I got to campus, the second plane had crashed. I was getting my Master's in Social Work at the time, so I was in a classroom full of future social workers and a social worker professor. We were all processing what we were hearing as it was happening. As it became clear that our country was under attack, all I wanted to do was hold my child. Even if we were all blasted to smithereens by the end of the day, I wanted my baby to be with me. About half an hours or so later, we were dismissed from class; I think the university dismissed everyone. I raced to the daycare and got my son. I didn't even want to let him go to put him in his carseat. And then I watched the news. In confusion and terror, I watched scenes play over and over.
The planes.
The fires.
The people running.
...
The people jumping.
...
The buildings crumbling.
I remember thinking over and over how it looked like a scene from a movie...that as a society we had actually been desensitized to images like this from movies. We had seen famous cities destroyed countless times before. I specifically recalled the 1996 film Independence Day. I knew what I was watching was real but it felt utterly surreal. It was so horrible, but I couldn't look away - until finally the tightness in my chest became unbearable. I was torturing myself, and continuing to watch would do more harm than good. Even when I turned the TV off, the images continued to flash through my mind. The most disturbing for me was the people jumping - knowing they were falling dozens of stories to their deaths, but that being their only hope of survival. I kept imagining the desperate fear people must have been feeling to decide to jump. I imagined the fears of the people trapped in the stories above where the planes blasted holes in the buildings. To not know what's going on, but know that something terrible has happened. To know you are going to die. To know you and hundreds of people you know and work with are going to die. I think about the phone calls that people made to say goodbye. I think about the people who never had a chance to call. I think about the people who called in sick that day. I think about the people who went to work that day despite wanting to call out that day. I think about the people who happened to be running late. I wonder how time passes when you are awaiting death, surrounded by unfathomable sights, sounds, and smells of death. I was not in New York that day. I had never even been. I did not personally know anyone who died that day. I'm not even sure I know anyone who personally knew someone who died that day...I definitely did not 20 years ago. But I do know that I was traumatized that day. We all were. None of us were the same after 9/11. Things never went back to normal. It was like we lost our innocence that day. But did we know that then...to what extent we were changed? Did we know that 20 years later we still would not be able to take liquids on planes? Did we fully comprehend the collective trauma we experienced? Of course not. What happened that day was unfathomable as well as all the fallout. I was 24 years old at the time. I went to school in an environment where we were able to process and support one another. But what about everywhere else? Everybody else? And what about the children, the very little children, whose lives were fundamentally altered by 9/11. They have no memories of it. They have not memories of anyone who died that day. They have no real memories of a pre-9/11 world. But it happened during their lifetime and it left an indelible mark on their lives. It was a disruption of their life path that altered the trajectory of their development. The survived a trauma that they have no memory of but that irreparably wounded the world they would grow up in. Their parents were traumatized. I have noticed that many kids from my son's generation (born 1998-2000) seem to be troubled, kind of lost, and hurting. I think part of that is because of 9/11. Because we didn't talk about trauma then like we do now, nor did we comprehend the deep wounds 9/11 would leave, we as a society didn't address it properly, if at all. I think COVID has traumatized us similarly, possibly worse because of its literally global impact. The is another generation of kids growing up in the midst of trauma, being raised by parents who were already carrying trauma baggage from 9/11 (and natural disasters like Katrina, multiple mass shootings, racial and political unrest) - never mind what happens in their individual personal lives. How do you even begin to heal the trauma of the world? How do you make everyone aware that they may not be okay and that that's okay? How do we explain to people en masse that these traumas may play a part in the inexplicable underlying discontentment/discomfort that they have never been able to name or understand and that they never remember a time they didn't feel it? We are a world full of hurting people. There is a saying that hurt people hurt people. With the internet and TV being so easily accessible by most, where we can feed ourselves on a never-ending diet of more trauma that we would in our individual lives. We see more catastrophic things, and we can see them over and over. We are bombarded with images and stories of atrocities. How do we counter that? How do we protect ourselves? How do we teach our children to protect themselves? How do we heal our collective and individual selves? I honestly don't know. But I pray for my children...all the children...and all the broken people. I will do my part to heal myself and to share that healing with others and not spread trauma. That is what I can do.
