A Quarter Century and What Have We Learned?

 

     9/11 happened over three years before I began blogging in early 2005. I've written about it on the anniversary several times and after a while, I ran out of things to say about it. One year, I simply listed the names of all 2977 people who'd suffered horrible deaths that day.

     I was working for an automotive/aerospace company's QC department on 9/11/2001. Not long after I got to work, those who had computers began getting the first reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center. The North Tower was struck first then roughly 45 minuets later, the South Tower. At first, all we got were static images, fireballs belching from two of the tallest buildings in the world. Then it was the Pentagon then United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in a field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

     Then the towers fell, even WTC 7, even though it wasn't on fire and hadn't been struck by a plane. The trauma just never seemed to end that day. 

     You don't need me to tell you it was the darkest day in American history, at least since Pearl Harbor. For the only time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5, which states that all NATO countries have to respond when another NATO nation is attacked. When you attack one, you attack them all.

     Largely because he bellowed into a bullhorn on a pile of rubble, we gave our "president" an unheard of 91% approval rating despite him sitting frozen in a tiny plastic chair in a Florida classroom for a full seven minutes when his Chief of Staff told him about the South Tower. We looked, naively, up to a Republican government for leadership and guidance during the most emotionally vulnerable moment in our nation's history.

     Bush commemorated 9/11 by releasing four paintings on Instagram, including that moment when Andy Card gave him the news (at least he nailed the vacant deer-in-the-headlights stare).

     That Republican government responded by attacking two nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 and suspending our civil liberties. 

     A quarter of a century later, we still haven't gotten all of them back.

     But for one brief shining moment, America was united and nearly all nations united with us in our collective grief. There was no partisanship, temporarily, there were no political parties. We were all Americans and we were all hurting. That was all that needed to be said.

     However political partisanship eventually creeps its way into everything. Even sacred cows become partisans. And how soon we'd forgotten the words of Ben Franklin, who'd written in the 18th century, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     New York City Mayor Mamdani was a nine year-old boy when 9/11 occurred. If you'd told any New Yorker back then that within 25 years, New York City would have its first Muslim mayor, you would've been locked up in Bellevue's psych ward.

     But, at the end of those 25 years, we're seeing an ugly partisanship cropping up around this special anniversary. A petition was advanced that would've barred Mayor Mamdani from the 911 ceremony in Manhattan. 

 

     Because partisan speeches and political grandstanding are forbidden from official 9/11 ceremonies, Trump decided to stay away from his native city and chose, for the second year in a row, to fall asleep at the Pentagon during their own ceremony. If he wasn't allowed to grandstand and turn it into a MAGA rally, if he wasn't allowed to make it all about himself, he wanted no part of it.

      Keep in mind, this 9/11 ceremony comes less than a day after a midterm convention in which Ted Cruz inveighed against Democrats and some onlookers shouted death threats. Trump unleashed a monster in 2015 and it's one he won't be able to put back in the cage when he finally leaves office.