. . . because I’m not inhabiting the appropriate emotional and intellectual space right now. As a public historian, I suppose I should be interested in the performance of memory and its material culture, but I’m not feeling it right now.
Although I now know people who were in New York City that day as well as people who knew someone lost in the attacks, in 2001 I wasn’t in contact with anyone in New York. I’ve observed that, like me, many Californians had a very different experience of September 11, 2001 than did people back East. We were geographically removed, and–relative to people in New York, Washington D.C., Boston, and Pennsylvania–I’m guessing the majority of Californians were at least a couple degrees of separation removed from the immediate victims of the attacks (unless, of course, we had family or friends on the ill-fated Los Angeles-bound planes).
Fang’s and my experience was moderated by a static-riddled broadcast of the Today Show on a smallish TV screen; we had just moved to Davis and didn’t yet have our cable or DSL connections. This lack of media contributed to our feeling of distance from the events. Accordingly, while I was shocked and saddened by the deaths of September 11, I immediately adopted a longer-term perspective on the event, wondering what it would mean for everyday life in the U.S., as well as what kinds of military entanglements it would engender. Fang had much the same reaction; as he recounted in a post five years ago, upon seeing that a plane had crashed into the second tower, he said, “This country is about to go screaming to the right.”
And hoo boy, has it ever.
The tragedy of September 11 didn’t, alas, contain itself to that day. It has been played out every day since–not only in individual and national mourning of the victims, but in poor political decisions, an erosion of civil liberties, a rising Islamophobia, and two (or more, depending on how you’re counting them) wars that have contributed significantly to our current domestic economic troubles.
I’m not prone to anger, but those legacies of September 11 raise my hackles. Here’s hoping I won’t feel the same way on the 15th or 20th anniversaries of the event.
