We said we never would forget.
But we’ve forgotten.
We’ve forgotten the terror and the horror and the fear.
We’ve forgotten the sorrow and the searching and the dust.
We’ve forgotten the scent of death, the burned wind across the city.
We’ve forgotten the bewilderment, the shattering of who we thought we were, and what we thought truth was.
In New York, we moved, in those first days after the attacks of 9/11, with wary caution. The wail of ambulances made us tremble. The sight of firefighters made us weep. We sweated through our nightmares. Our lives, in those days and weeks and months, were the lives of the abused: the women beaten by their lovers, children by fathers, alert, afraid, unsure.
And then time passed, and like the victims of abuse, we came to trust again. We grew complacent. We have not, after all, seen anything of the magnitude of 9/11 in the 11 years since.
But something else is happening, too, instead – and it is what happens, too, in relationships bloodied by domestic violence: A twisting of truths, a confusion of values, until we no longer know or comprehend the nature of the reality we are living. Did he hit you because he had a bad day? You must have carried an expression of insult on your face. Did he lock you in the closet when he learned you’d visited your mother? But you know you oughtn’t to have gone. The problem becomes, in time, not the violence or the abuser; the problem becomes us, and what we do to cause – and to deserve it.
I was one of those women once. I remember. And I remember, too, the blindness that enfolded me, through which I experienced a life I now no longer recognize as my own, even as I have spent – am still spending – decades overcoming it.
And so, too, America, as we apologize for being who we are, for the values that we stand for. (And not just America: It happens in Europe just as much, if not, in fact, even more. Do Muslim-American soldiers like Nidal Malik Hasan, whose massacre in Fort Hood killed 13 and wounded 32, take offense at America’s military actions in the Middle East? Well, then, perhaps we should withdraw our troops – as Spain did in 2004, following the so-called “11-M” train bombings by Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic extremists in Madrid.
Do Muslims riot in the streets of Gaza, Islamabad and Damascus, firebombing buildings and killing one another in anger over a cartoon drawing published oceans away in Denmark? Then Denmark must apologize (fortunately, it did not); and others must be sure never to do the same. (And so Yale University Press censors its own publication of the drawings in a stunning demonstration of the imprisonment of academic freedom.)
Do groups like CAIR take offense at documentary footage of Muslim clerics calling for sharia in the USA and promising to “fly the flag of Islam” from the White House, as in “The Third Jihad?” Then we mustn’t show it, should we? Even when it’s true.
And so on.
So gradual, and yet so complete, have these changes become that we have reached a level where we are willing even to sign away some of the basic, most sacred principles on which our nation was founded, and which make us unique in the world. Late last year, the UN adopted initiative 16/18, an initiative of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (formerly known as the Organization of Islamic Conferences), which, as I wrote at the time, “seeks to limit speech that is viewed as ‘discriminatory’ or which involves the ‘defamation of religion’ – specifically that which can be viewed as ‘incitement to imminent violence.’ ”
Let me repeat that: “Seeks to limit speech which ‘can be viewed as incitement to imminent violence.’” In other words, the United States of America, more than ten years after 9/11, agreed to renounce the very basis of its identity, free speech, because of the possibility that violence could erupt in response to something that is said.
Just as I did, once. Just as every battered woman does, and every abused child. The crime becomes not the violence, but what we do to inspire it.
This 9/11, then, after the first ten years have passed, perhaps it’s time for us all to make a promise to recover, to stop blaming ourselves and to stand strong for our values, our principles and what we know is right. For the sake of those who died – not only on that memorial day, but in the wars we’ve fought for freedom since then – to heal, to reclaim our values as Americans and take back who we are.