Nine years on

I wrote the following piece four years ago -- still don't think I'll improve upon it, so I offer it again, but with a few comments at the end.

It was an especially beautiful morning, and really a gorgeous day, one of those days that make September the best time of year in Minnesota. The sky was clear and the morning air was crisp. I climbed on the 4 bus on Foss Road and began my journey to my office in downtown Minneapolis. I arrived at my desk about the same time the first plane hit.

We all can remember what we were doing that day. I remember thinking that this was different. I remember the first reports coming around as routine office chatter – “did you hear that a small plane hit the World Trade Center?” Then we learned the second plane had hit. And the rumors were flying. Planes were crashing into buildings all over the country. The Air Force was shooting down airliners. We knew the nation was under attack, an attack we couldn’t quite comprehend. Work at my office crawled to a standstill as a single television set showed the smoking buildings. Broadcast e-mails from the top executives imploring everyone to “get back to work” were ignored. We didn’t know what we should do. A co-worker and fellow Catholic, who knew of my involvement at my home parish because we’d compared our experiences, suggested that we go to St. Olaf for noon Mass. A group of us did and found the downtown church filled to the rafters. We heard the pastor speak of peace, of remaining calm, of God’s love on a day when hatred was streaked across the skies and the airwaves. And we knew that Father Forliti was right. But we also knew that there would be a fight and the world had changed.

I went home that night and turned on the news. My son, freshly arrived from kindergarten, bounded down the steps, looking for his usual dose of Scooby Doo. My wife called down, “No, Benjamin, don’t go down there!” But he was there and he saw the footage of the plane striking the second tower. And he knew, in his child-like way, that this was real, and it was horrible. He started to cry and ran back up the stairs, screaming “I don’t want to see that!” I will never forget the look on his face.

Five years on, I think a lot of us are still screaming “I don’t want to see that!” It’s a rare thing in this life to actually witness evil, to see malevolence on a grand scale, to view an atrocity happen before your eyes. Most of the time, evil tends to happen quietly, in the background, without wide exposure. Because we don’t often see it as it occurs, we tend to either recoil from what we see, or fail to understand what we are seeing, or deny that we see is evil. That’s natural – we call it coping. But coping is not enough. Taking off our shoes in the airport is coping. We can cope indefinitely. But evil remains.

And I think we have to call this thing what it is – evil. Flying planes into buildings is evil. Bombing nightclubs and mosques is evil. Providing a cash stipend to the families of suicide bombers is evil. Pushing elderly men in wheelchairs into the Mediterranean is evil. Blowing up subway trains is evil. This is what we still face, five years on. I cannot predict where we will be in five years from this day, but I can only assume that we will still face evil. And saying “I don’t want to see that” will remain insufficient.

And now we are nine years on. We have just spent the week watching a crackpot minister preaching out of a Quonset hut playing a game of geopolitical chicken that drew satellite trucks and camera crews from news organizations that, nine years previously, were a whole lot easier to take seriously. And you know what? I don't want to see that.

It's almost too easy to forget what happened that day. We had plenty to do today -- a day that was about as beautiful as that eventful Tuesday, nine years before. Mrs. D and I took the kids for eye exams, I ran to the home improvement store for tarps and gutter scoops, and we both spent time sorting out the detritus in the garage. Aside from listening to Mitch Berg and Ed Morrissey talking about the anniversary on the radio in between errands, I'll admit that I didn't think very much about 9/11/01 today, because there were other things to do.

As we flip from 9/11/01 to 9/11/10, a few things are clear. We don't cower in fear on this day and, to me, we conclusively demonstrate that the terrorists have failed through resuming our normal lives. Most people treated this day as a normal late summer weekend -- the football stadia were filled, there were people mowing lawns and washing cars on my block and the kids were riding their bicycles up and down the street. The only way this day was any different is that you noticed flags at half staff all over town. The horrific roar of death we heard nine years ago, as the towers collapsed, is only so much background noise today. There's a statement in that.

There is danger, too. Memories fade. We lose our edge, our awareness, just a little bit. We have a president who says that combat operations are over in the Middle East, but it's far from clear that the war is over. We have gone from shoe bombers to underwear bombers, but we still have bombers and the cynical men who send them forth are still waiting for the proper moment to strike again.

Nine years on, I worry that we are finding it too easy to forget.