Remembering September 12th

We all remember where we were when we heard about the September 11th attacks.  I was in heavy traffic on the Massachusetts turnpike, heading into Boston.  My wife called to tell me that she was watching t.v. and they reported that a plane hit one of the twin towers.  I envisioned a small plane, maybe with just a pilot and no passengers, and assumed that the collision was an accident.  As she continued to describe the television coverage, she saw a second plane hit the other tower.  It was immediately obvious that it was a terrorist attack.

I made my way into the office and found our lawyers and staff in a conference room watching the t.v. news.  Many were visibly frightened, and all were struggling to make sense of the morning events.  We were in one of downtown Boston's taller buildings, and I tried to reassure myself and those around me that our building, tall though it was, was an unlikely target for terrorists.  From many of our conference rooms and offices we could see Logan Airport, from which two of the planes had taken off.  The airport was shut down now, an eerily quiet scene of an unfathomable crime.  

The firm sent us home, and it was a long, slow ride in traffic to the suburb where I live.  The usually aggressive Boston driving had given way to acts of kindness:  drivers graciously let each other into traffic rather than cut each other off.  When I got to my suburb, I stopped for gas.  As I got out of the car, I was struck by the extraordinary weather that morning - the blue sky, the sunshine, the perfect temperature - and I wondered what it must be like that moment in downtown Manhattan.  The foreign worker who pumped my gas commented gleefully that America had this coming.  If I were a violent person, I would have slugged him.  Instead, I simply gave him a look of disgust, told him he was wrong and drove away.

After I got home I watched the news all day and into the evening; the awful scenes of people running in panic, of victims leaping from the towers to certain death, of the towers falling.  Late that night my then-11-year-old son walked in on me watching CNN just as they showed people jumping from one of the towers.  I didn't want him to see it. (Just a couple of years earlier, he and I had walked atop the World Trade Center, an experience that had filled him with boundless joy.)   A few minutes later we heard a loud thunderclap, and he broke down crying in his mother's arms.  I wondered if our children would be scarred for life, if the attacks would change their worldview the way that JFK's assassination had changed ours.

Although we remember the horrific events of September 11th, we too easily forget the signs of hope that followed.  There was, for some months after the event, a communal sense of service and love for our country.  For that brief period, people changed.  We were kinder to each other.  We took less for granted.  We helped and supported each other.  We slowed down, as air traffic was grounded, and we all stayed in our places for a week or more under an abnormally quiet sky.  Volunteer workers gathered in New York to dig our nation out of the rubble and giant holes now renamed "ground zero."  We staged concerts to raise money for the victims.  Some of us Red Sox fans rooted for the Yankees, and my firm's Boston office reached out to our New York office to offer whatever comfort and support we were able to give.  

And we were prouder than ever to be Americans.  The people of the world showed compassion for us in a way that hadn't happened since JFK was killed.  We rallied around the flag and our President.  We were not Republicans and Democrats; we were Americans, bound together with a common, tragic experience, with some degree of fear, and with tremendous displays of courage.  

I hope and pray that the cowardly acts of terror that struck us that day will never be repeated, not on our soil, and not on the soil of any other nation.  And yet I also long for the sense of brotherhood and sisterhood that united us in tragedy's wake.  It is heartening to know that the American spirit not only survives, but indeed triumphs over a national catastrophe.  But it is hard to see that spirit of patriotic and humanitarian unity today, eight years after the events.  The extreme partisanship that has infected our country overshadows that unity.  The resort to name calling on the airwaves (e.g., "socialist") may have roots not only in political differences, but in racism.  The shout of "You lie!" in the House chamber by a South Carolina Congressman during a Presidential address would not have been tolerated at any other time in our history, and certainly not in the immediate aftermath of September 11th.  We can debate when we began our return into the partisan abyss (my best guess - when we launched the war in Iraq), but there can be little doubt that we are there.

So it comes to this.  Can we regain our unity in times of relative peace and security, or does it take an attack from a common enemy to unite us?  Are we a nation hopelessly divided along lines of party and ideology,  or are we one nation, indivisible?  The answer seemed clear on September 12th.  Today, it is hard to hear over the shouting.