If you’re reading this post on 9/11/2011 then I’m probably wandering somewhere near Ground Zero while your eyes are skimming the page. I had a book signing event yesterday but I wrote this days and weeks ago and set it to automatically post at 8am today. I didn’t want to miss today even if I’m not at my computer.

• • •

10 years ago, at 8am, the world was a different place. My students were different people. I was different too.

Prior to 9/11 I’d been through a couple of things that left post-traumatic scars—things I don’t really want to go into on a blog—so 9/11 wasn’t unfamiliar psychological territory to me. But it was unfamiliar to so, so many others who were also far too close to those buildings.

For those of you who are new to my blog or my story, I wasn’t far away at Stuyvesant (though you’d think they were much closer than they were, the way the papers went on about them). But I also wasn’t in the buildings themselves, skittering down the stairs while the firemen went up, up, up.

I was at a small, unimposing, city high school—The High School for Leadership and Public Service—about a half city block south of the South Tower. The only school closer to the Towers was our next-door neighbor, The School for Economics and Finance. You probably never heard of either of our schools. That’s because our schools were home to “city kids” (that’s secret code for “mostly Black and Hispanic kids”). But you should have heard of our school. It was amazing. Amazing administrators. Amazing staff. Amazing kids.
Our kids beat Stuyvesant at Moot Court.
I’m not braggin’.
I’m just sayin’…

Anyway.

We were there.

• • •

I wrote about our 9/11 experience on a blog long before there were blogs. I also wrote about it irregularly here, on or around 9/11 anniversaries.

They also made this video

I also have a bunch of posts I started but never published. It’s hard to write about 9/11. Actually, that’s not true. It’s hard to write meaningfully about the day. But I’ll try.

• • •

I was asked by a fellow blogger, Julie at Happy Catholic, if I’d want to add a 9/11 post to a portal she’s a part of and I said yes (it’s not like this is new terrain for me). Then she said, “maybe something about forgiveness” and that stopped me.

Forgiveness?

For 9/11?

You’re kidding, right?

It’s not that I don’t want to… it’s just that I don’t really feel like that’s part of my purview. I didn’t lose anyone close to me. The Towers didn’t fall on me (nearby, sure, but I was in Battery Park when they came down. Other teachers were still in our school building). I have no influence on others’ abilities to forgive nor was I a target that needs to dole out forgiveness. At least, not directly.

But then I thought, no. I actually do have something to say about forgiveness. It relates to my post after the USA Today article came out. I was peeved, really ticked, at the way people flame on blogs and make casually cruel comments on otherwise serious writing—or at least good writing about a serious topic. I was mostly, however, seething at the “oh, get over it” crowd. These are the people who say things like:

  • “aren’t you past this yet?” after someone miscarries…
  • “it’s already been a year…” after your father’s death…
  • “how long are you going to do this to yourself?” when you’re in the middle of PTSD

as if it’s a choice. As if any emotional reaction is a choice.

There’s a forgiveness gene or maybe an empathy gene that seems to have been switched off somewhere around when Gordon Gecko first reared his ugly head. That’s when I first noticed it, anyway. I can’t guarantee anyone felt more civil before that, but they sure as heck acted more civilly before that. Me? I’d like to be surrounded by a little more acting every once in awhile. I don’t much care how folks feel—and you can’t really change that anyway—but we can expect certain behaviors from civil society (or at least Miss Manners thinks so).

I’m pleasantly impressed with the site GoodReads and the way it lets you establish tone in book groups. Once those things are out in the open, once expectations are stated, folks seem to have little difficulty living up to them. Maybe it’s that GoodReads is full of real names and thus we aren’t all just faceless ciphers. Dunno, but I do know that it’s a relief to visit a site that’s got some class.

So this is my 9/11 point—in those sleepwalking days following the attacks, New York was a subdued place, but a timidly hopeful one. I recall taking a lot of time to talk to neighbors on the stoop (since we had no school to go back to at first), walk through Prospect Park, play with my son, and talk to everyone from my school I could get a hold of—reliving the day, identifying where everyone was, making sure we were all still here. All safe. All okay.

Because the best we could hope for was okay.

And we all wanted the country to be okay too. I know my friends and I spoke a lot about how the aftermath could be turned into a positive—

  • Maybe they’ll encourage everyone to plant victory gardens? Shared sacrifice? Support the troops?
  • I guess that about wraps it up for oil. Maybe now we’ll get some clean energy!
  • Maybe now they’ll finally start putting real money behind improving train lines. It’s more civilized to go by train anyway (and they can’t take down a building with a train!).
  • Maybe we’ll be able to keep this civil tone in politics now.

But that isn’t what happened.

None of that happened.

At best, we were encouraged to go shopping.

No sense of “we’re all in this together” lasted past the occasional “We’re all New Yorkers Now” bumper stickers. No one (with the possible and very local exception of Rudy Giuliani) worked to draw people together to support one another, to see ourselves in the faces of those who lost loved ones, to acknowledge any sense of “there but for the Grace of God…” And to me, that’s a sadly missed opportunity. We had a chance to get our empathy gene back… and we blew it.

The last ten years have found our country more divided than we have been since the Gilded Age—divided politically as well as economically. I hear people screaming. I hear lots of people judging. I hear lots of vitriol and nastiness and pain.

But I never hear it from real people.

The actual people I know—whether we agree or disagree politically—are all kind, gentle, generous folks who are trying hard to make a good life for their families against ridiculous economic and societal odds. Everyone I know works day and night to make sure their kids are safe, well-educated, well-fed, and as decently socialized as you can expect to be in our world. I don’t know anyone who’s pro-abortion any more than I know someone who’s anti-choice. Those aren’t our words. Those are words that have been put in our mouths through sound bites and media machines.

And, lest I come off as another judge-y voice, I know media people too—and they’re working just as hard to be good and make things better as we are. Maybe even harder.

I think that’s the important thing. None of these people are bad. Or evil. Or unworthy of my sympathy, empathy, or time. Even if we don’t agree on everything, these people I know?—these are good people.

Pogo said, rather famously, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

There’s a “dead hand” that pushes us along, riling folks up about conspiracies that don’t exist, evil that isn’t out there, and threats that aren’t even at the level of pipe dreams. But they get repeated in the echo chamber that is our 24/7 news environment. And we hear. And as we hear, we believe. And then it filters down, this casual cruelty we ingest from the variously polarized news venues. It filters down until we believe it’s okay

  • for us to judge those who are mourning
  • for us to judge the poor (the parents of my students were working many jobs—read Nickled and Dimed)
  • for us to judge families who are wrestling with a family member who is mentally ill or struggling with addiction
  • for us to judge how people live their lives, in their homes, away from our line of vision
  • for us to judge how other people do their jobs, especially when we’ve never held that job ourselves

and the more we judge, the more we believe we’re right, the louder we get, the less we listen.

I never learned anything from talking loudly (though, G-d knows, I’ve tried).

So that’s my forgiveness message to everyone and to myself too (because I’ve been as guilty as the next). Let’s give everyone a pass, shall we? Let’s assume the best—that we’re all doing the best we can with the odds stacked against us. Let’s find a way to be a little more generous of spirit and understanding and, yes, forgiving of one another’s choices.

To those who are still grieving 9/11 and it’s aftermath, I give you my prayers for peace. You are not harpies. You are not weak. You are you, and you are doing the best you can. To those who are grieving about, well, anything at all, I hope beyond hope that the people who surround you give you the space and grace you need to heal. It is a process; G-d only knows how long it will take. It’s not up to us to judge.

At least, it shouldn’t be.

I can always imagine…

Video made by Avalon Arts Studio?

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