Recently I was interviewed for USA Today’s article 10 years later, those who left NYC look back. During the course of the interview I was struck by the kindness and generosity of the three people with whom I made contact at the news organization—the reporter, the videographer/photographer, and the web video editor. Seriously smart, funny, kind people who didn’t fit the casual stereotype of biased media in any regard. They were generous of spirit and hard working, devoted to communicating what had happened to New York and New Yorkers after the September 11th attacks as honestly as possible—this article being the first foray into more 9/11 coverage, as I understand it.

Now, I’m not unused to seeing ridiculous responses from folks who trawl the interwebs—I did, after all, see a blog response where a man used one of my 16 year old students’ written memories of 9/11 as “proof” positive that it was a bomb and not planes that brought the Towers down. Why? Because this boy said the “explosion” was loud. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that was it. That was the proof. I posit that you have to be grasping at straws to (a) have to depend on a kid for your main backup to an international conspiracy, and (b) to ignore the enormous bulk of evidence against you (including, btw, that in the same passage the kid talks about the planes).

All that is my way of saying I know there are stupid, lazy thinkers out there. Got it. Fine.

I find it sad, however, that the immediate responses to the USAToday piece on people who (clearly sadly) left a city they loved after the attacks were comments amounting to nothing more than ideological snark. What motivated us to leave the City encompasses a breadth of emotional responses to grief, fear, and family concerns. Our decisions were not easy. The process was fraught for all of us. We all have days where we wonder… what if. All of that is there in the article/video. So what was the first posted response to the text?

Another fluff article from USA Today that missed obvious facts! The state of New York lost two electoral votes from population loss as a whole in the census for a number of reasons. The facts are economic decay, run away taxes and the uncertainty of 911 . …no surprises here, another liberal state in decline!*

Yep. That was it. It goes downhill from there.

taken by student Jennifer Rivera as we evaculated

I suppose in our current state of crazed polarization, it’s to be expected that a human-interest piece gets reduced to more political shoving and name calling, using labels rather than thoughts. The ones I expected to see did in fact show up by the end of the first page of replies:

And NO one else felt anything? Did you have to be there to feel it? Too bad, then don’t go back and let it go. everyone else has.

And that’s the one I wanted to share with you.

Remember back when Gabrielle Giffords (God Bless her for showing up at Congress yesterday!) was shot just a bit down the street from our place in Tucson and I posted about wanting a Mom Brigade? I’m still hoping for that. I’m not sure when we, as a country, lost our empathy gene, but I’m starting to wonder if we ever had one. There’s no question that our country is young—an adolescent, if you will—and, as with teenagers, we think we know more than we do (and prove it often) and kind of shove everyone around because we have no sense of time or history. We are not, for example, France. Or Germany. Or Italy. Or Greece. Or China. We have not been in our “skin” as it were, for hundreds (thousands!) of years like some other countries that have stood the test of time. We are a bunch of loud kids in the back of the room, making it hard for anyone else to get anything important done.

America as a country often responds like a teenager, selfishly and frequently without understanding the ramifications of what we do—sometimes that leads to enormous generosity and courage. Sometimes we bully. As though watching it all in a Petri dish, some days I watch the most thoughtful, compassionate, and logical of my former students try to engage the least-able of my former students on Facebook when one posts something sadly ignorant about politics or the environment**. The more thoughtful get bullied by a barrage of bullhooey and I weep because I didn’t do my job.

To my mind, my job was not to get my kids to “agree” with me. It was to help them write well, cite their sources, and think through a topic logically. I couldn’t have cared less whether they were right, left, center, up, or down. I just wanted them to think…and cite their sources. And spell better than me. And…

And lest you think I’m a country-hater bent on the destruction
of all that is American—sorry. Not. I don’t buy that
anyone has a corner on the Patriotism market.
I Love the country. Love. It.
I just want to see it behave itself.

So yeah, I’m still hoping for the Mom Brigade—an army of adults in the country who are capable of realizing that there are many ways to respond emotionally to… anything, who don’t judge others based on pious Puritanical models*** or statements that begin with “well I never would have done…” because you don’t know. You simply don’t know. You can’t know. I hope you never have to know.

Of COURSE everyone in the country felt something. I know my family in Tucson had what I, at least, would call PTSD for a long while after the attacks—mostly because they couldn’t contact my sister or me for much of that morning, but yeah. Everyone was attacked that day.

But, you gotta admit, it’s different when someone’s trying to drop a building on YOUR head. When planes and loud noises make you jump—for years.

But it’s this line that really makes me squirm—even more than the political screeds:

Too bad, then don’t go back and let it go. everyone else has.

Anyone ever lost a loved one? Anyone had to deal with the rest of the world—friends even—telling you to “move on” and “get over it” and “time to get back to normal” after you’ve lost a parent…or a child? I’ve watched this happen. It’s ugly. It’s just mean. And it isn’t helpful—at all. My point is this, online or in person—who am I to tell someone who’s grieving to get over it? Who are any of us to put a clock on emotions? Why do we feel that we have the right to judge other’s emotional responses to events? Where does that come from?

I actually banned the word “should” from my classroom
one year because it upset kids so much (“you should do
your homework on the train,” could easily start an argument
when said to a kid who rode a bike—there’s something about
the holier-than-thou “should” that rankles).

I loved that when we got married, my husband and I were told that, traditionally speaking, we were “bride and groom” for a year. Why? Because, lets be honest, it takes at least that long to get used to marriage. We’d lived together before the ceremony. We’d known each other for over eight years. I couldn’t have been more in love with the man (still am). Didn’t matter. Married is different than not-married. It just is. Just like a terrorist attack that takes down two, hundred-plus-story buildings on top of your town is different from, say, having a really bad day. And finding the new “normal” takes time—different amounts of time for different people. Who are we to judge?

I sure hope this is all a phase we’re going through and that somehow we’ll be able to pull a new normal out of the wreckage. All I can see happening since 9/11/01 is that we’ve become more polarized and less civil—at least online and in the voting booth. In my daily life, I’ve not found this to be the case at all. Even folks who I disagree with politically are just flat out wonderful people. So where does this come from?

You got me? But wiser heads than mine in the Mom Brigade need to help me come up with a way to respond to this judgmental piety that comes flowing so easily off of fingertips and out of the mouths of pundits. I used to think “just don’t read it and it’ll go away.” But it hasn’t. It wont.

Maybe if we can just last a few hundred more years…

• • •

*Actually, I’ve said before and I’ll continue to say, NYC was the only place I’ve lived where I didn’t mind paying taxes. Boy do you see your tax dollars at work—free concerts, museums, great public transportation, cops and firemen who know you. All the stuff I miss is the stuff that would probably categorize it as a “liberal” state. So… Just sayin’…

**This goes along with the incompetent rating themselves as competent and vice versa.

***Checkout the book Why Don’t Students Like School? (brain & learning) by Daniel Willingham

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and
David Eagleman’s Incognito on the latest brain research on this—fascinating!

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