Last evening, I had the privilege of attending a vigil and walk hosted by September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. I’m sure some of the family members who lost loved ones 25 years today will also be at the annual remembrance ceremony on the grounds of the World Trade Center where the names of those killed will be read out, in front of a bunch of politicians, a group that most notably this year will include our Lord Mayor Zohran Mamdani (and HOW DARE YOU Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki or other Republican BIGOTS suggest that this City’s first Muslim mayor not attend… as if there weren’t numerous Muslims killed on 9-11 working in the WTC or Pentagon or as first responders… besides the hundreds of thousands or millions killed in our “war on terror”) and most thankfully will not include the most glaring “lesson” of September 11th, the current President of the United States.
The short talks were moving, of course, and were given by family members of the fallen, be they on the planes, working in the Towers or first responders. The emcee was the indefatigable Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (who was downtown and broadcasting “on the day”). Amy in turn was introduced by my friend Jeremy Varon, a history professor and long time activist and author of “Our Grief Is Not a Cry For War,” a comprehensive history of the post-9-11 peace movement. I met Jeremy with the customary leave taking one gives at Jewish funerals (“next time under happier circumstances”) and he responded, “I know, it just keeps getting worse.” And yet, there was this quiet optimism through it all; that this particular group of 9-11 families did not want a global war on terror, or anything that would create more grieving families like themselves, performed in their name, or especially in the names of their lost loved ones. And Amy Goodman suggested that this was the position of the silenced majority: that a corporate media doing the bidding of the powerful insisted on giving us a contrary message, that the only answer to everything was violence and vengeance. The speaking took place in Union Square in Manhattan, fittingly, in front of a statute of Mahatma Gandhi, before a spirited walk down Broadway of a mile or two to the site of the WTC, where any political messaging in the forms of protest signs were put away and exchanged for electric candles and respectful silence. I also had the privilege of walking with my friend Stephanie R., an organizer of many a vigil and protest, who told me her husband worked on lower Broadway that morning.
She told me that she remembered the day vividly– she is not sure when she first heard from her husband– did he call? Or did he just show up at the school where she worked? But in either event, she knew he was safe. She couldn’t recall if the subways were running (they were not). And we discussed an era when payphones still existed (I called Mrs. TD from one on Canal Street, before crossing to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge, having left my own office-at-the-time on Church Street, a block north of the North Tower, to go to a courthouse for a trial that was not going to happen that day, walking through a darkened, debris and crowded streetscape of countless people just in shock.) And I talked about how I went to court later in the week– in Brooklyn, because courts in Manhattan were closed, at least that first week– on behalf of someone whose son was a first responder– a firefighter who gave his life that day. And I had my first contact with my employer the following Monday, to tell me that I was being let go. And we talked about the World Trade Center Health Registry, which, having been downtown that day, both Stephanie’s husband and I were eligible to be part of… but was the Loquacious Pup was not, notwithstanding that she suffered with a horrible disease in 2024 (perhaps related to living just a mile downwind to incredibly toxic air, more toxic than we were told according to a recent document release by Mayor Mamdani)…
Good times. And we talked about the insane stupidity of it all. It was just impossible to believe that our country and the people in it could consistently learn every conceivable wrong lesson, and do the absolute stupidest and counter-productive thing at every single turn. And yet, here we are. The divisiveness of turning against the other just because they don’t look like us? Check. A pointlessly aggressive foreign policy almost calculated to create foreign enemies who might act against us? Check. A decision that we have to destroy our liberties to preserve our precious (and failing) “American way of life” to save it? Check. And that’s before we talk about the total surveillance state, or the normalization of torture or the use of concentration camps and dungeons, or of course, yet another “preemptive war” in the Middle East. This time without a “coalition of the willing.” Oh, and did I mention a weird decision (seemingly a matter of a personal bribe) to permit a certain Middle Eastern nation whose nationals constituted 15 of 19 highjack perpetrators to have the means to build nuclear weapons.
And yet. And yet people like us continue to take the time and trouble to attend these sort of events, even if it seems like hitting your heads against the wall. There are people of goodwill trying to live a life of meaning, and service to others. Even if the national (indeed, the global) “ethos” seems to be leaning ever more authoritarian, as aging failures (usually white and usually male) strike out at “the other” (often immigrants and invariably not white), and are willing to sacrifice democracy and freedom in the name of their hatreds. Sound familiar?
At the very moment that coalescing and cooperative action will be needed for challenges like, ahem, nuclear proliferation, climate change-for-the-worse), artificial stupidity (which the optimists suggest will kill us all in about three years… or are they just trying to talk up the stock price?), just to name a few… seems ever more out of reach, as parochial hatreds are propped up by the corporate media and, in the American context, “both parties” (by which I mean THE REPUBLICANS, even though Chuck Schumer and the Democrats do everything in their power to keep Republicans viable in the name of political fundraising).
And yet. It’s 25 years later, and many if not most of us are still here, and still not willing to completely give up, let alone lose hope. Indeed, some of us believe that the elections in less than two months time will brush back some of the excesses of the current President, and perhaps there will be serious change in 2028 when the entire Republican apparatus is likely thrown out. Or perhaps we are appropriately immune to this level of pollyannish talk and realize that the hope is in younger people who don’t have the hatreds and bigotries that got us to this point.
As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. I don’t know what will happen 25 years from now. I’m 63 now; the actuarial chart says that my making it to 88 is a less than even chance. You all find yourselves wherever you are on the chart. And hey… maybe that AI thing will kill us all, or climate change, or the nukes, or famine or preventable disease (in our present farcical dispensation where our national “health” minister is an anti-science vaccine denier and heroin addict) will finish us off.
I don’t know. This isn’t a day I have looked forward to, nor will it be next year, or the year after, and so forth. But maybe, just maybe… there is some hope for peaceful tomorrows?
Recent Comments