Friday, September 9, 2011

Remembrance

Well, I suppose, given what this weekend is, this post is inevitable. Some people are good at talking through emotions. I am not one of those people, but I am good at writing out my emotions.
I was ten years old, and in Mrs. Elkins' fifth grade class. It was a Tuesday morning; I was eating breakfast.
"Michael," my mom called from their downstairs bedroom. "Come down here for a second."
My dad left the kitchen and walked down the stairs. Being an awfully curious ten yer old, I followed. The Today Show was on, just like it was every morning, but the picture was not what I was used to seeing. It wasn't their studio. It wasn't even Rockefeller Plaza. It was of two buildings; smoke poured out of them about two-thirds of the way up.
It was the first time in my ten years that I'd seen reporters lost for words. The buildings weren't anything special to me; I've never been to New York, and someplace called the World Trade Center sounded like a business office. As they explained that two planes had flown into the buildings, the confusion mounted. How could any pilot not notice two enormous buildings in front of him? How did two planes just end up in downtown Manhattan?
As I remember, and I could be wrong, both buildings were standing when I left for school. My friends and I crouched in a basement window that looked into the music room. We huddled together, a group of confused ten- and eleven-year-olds, and watched the towers fall. Even after school started, all we did was watch more coverage of it. The thought that we could be able to do anything else was laughable. Who can think about long division when potentially thousands of innocent people are dying? People who woke up that morning, the same as us, had breakfast, and went to work. People who just wanted to go home and watch television that evening.
I didn't know anyone who died in the World Trade Center attacks. I didn't know anyone who was in New York at the time. My remembrance of the attacks isn't about individual people, and it isn't necessarily about that day; it is about what happened to me, personally, as a result.
First, this was when I permanently gave up on Christianity. I gave up on the notion of God. In my ten-year-old mind, I couldn't understand why a "loving God" would allow three thousand innocent people to die simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I couldn't understand how people could do such heinous things to other people simply because they followed different religions.
Second, I realized America wasn't the greatest country in the world. I was not proud to be an American. I couldn't believe that we would allow such things as the PATRIOT Act and the over-the-top TSA security to exist, when they fly in the face of the ideals upon which this country was founded. I couldn't help but feel like these extremists had accomplished their goal; we had effectively renounced the values that made us the US. It took me several years, and a lot of studying, to get back to a point where I could claim to truly be proud to be an American. To this day, I resent much of what our country does, but I know we have the potential to be better.
Third, I became an activist. I wanted to not only understand things, but be involved in them. I wanted to protest, to give speeches, to prove that I was not about to take any of this quietly. I helped out at the Snake River Alliance because my father was involved with them, but three years later, I joined the ACLU. I gave a speech on the steps of Boise's City Hall. I marched in parades, I handed out pamphlets and worked booths at events. Every time I read about someone being discriminated against, someone being unjustly detained, someone getting hurt in a disaster, I was personally outraged. To this day, I have to nail my feet to the floor to keep from getting on planes and going to places like Haiti, or Somalia. The fringe group who launched on our country ten years ago, while they might have gotten the response they wanted from our government, caused me to want to be a better person. I wanted to help people, to try and make sure that no one would ever be alone when they needed help.
Every time I see that image of the two towers billowing smoke, I think of what it must have felt like, to be on the floors above, knowing you weren't going to be able to get out. Every time I see an image of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, I think of what it must be like to see your possessions, your house, swept away in a flood of water caused by someone else's mistake. Every time I see images of people starving in a war-torn or corrupt country, I think of how unfair it is that we're dying of being too fat in this country. After 9/11/2001, I started to see the unfairness of the world, and I knew that I was going to spend the rest of my life doing something about it, one way or another. To do anything else just doesn't seem right.

No comments:

Post a Comment