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September 11, 2004
9/11 Essay: In praise of the Ordinary Life
I’ve spent this past week thinking about what I would write today. For me, as for many, September 11, 2001, is the seminal moment of my adult life. It has shaped me. It has shaped my approach to the macro issues surrounding my country and the world in which it exists. Whether or not I am consciously aware of the profundity of 9/11 as I read world news or debate with others on the Internet or in the flesh, I can look back at the person I was on 9/10/01 and realize the path I’m is not the one I was following then.
Words. Millions of words will be written today. Words that will recount exactly where we were, what we were doing, how we felt as we heard the words. For me, here in California, it was being barely asleep as the clock radio went off, tuned to my usual morning station KFI640 AM and hearing host Bill Handel say, “We’ve just gotten a report that a plane has hit the World Trade Center.”
Time stopped. Time has never been the same.
However, let me move beyond that. Move beyond the remembering of that horrible day. So many people will be writing and speaking today with words more elegant than mine of their own experience. They will speak to history of witnessing it and of their loved ones lost in it. Others will not speak today, choosing to remember quietly, in reverent silence and in an effort not to be consumed in a reliving of the horror still too close.
September 11, 2001, was an ordinary day. It was a day filled by ordinary tasks. Parents frustrated by dawdling youngsters. Commuters musing on where they’d have lunch that day and if they had time to stop for coffee before getting to the office. Turn on the tv, turn on the radio, listen for the weather, listen for the traffic report. Mommy, I can’t find my homework! Mommy, he’s making faces at me again, tell him to stop! Sweetie? Have you seen my blue tie? Hon, that went to the cleaners. Oh, can you pick up the cleaning on the way home today, I have a late meeting and won’t be able….
“Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.”
I want the ordinariness back. I really enjoy a life of family and work and books and home. I raise my children to be good people. I volunteer in my community to give back when others can’t. I’ve been a Band Booster mom, a Soccer mom and a PTA mom. I’ve organized fundraisers. I’ve organized donations to help my neighbors through tragedy. I was a Girl Scout and always buy their cookies. I’ve taught my daughters how to ride a bike and crochet a scarf. I’ve sewed Halloween costumes and prom dresses. I’ve hosted exchange students and been there for my children’s friends when they needed an adult’s ear. My own life has had its triumphs and tragedies but was never centered upon forcing change on my neighbors to conform to my way of life.
I’m part of those great-unwashed masses that is sneered at for the sheer middle-class ordinariness of my life.
I don’t revel in the changes in this country. I don’t gleefully caper on the bodies of the victims of 9/11 as proof of America’s evilness as too many others do. I don’t dismiss whole segments of the country because the people living there don’t wear the same clothes or listen to the same music as I do.
I want my ordinariness back, not by retreating into 9/10/01 and pretending 9/11/01 didn’t happen. Or by trying to dismiss it by saying it was Yes.it.was.Tragic.BUT. (ah … that magic “but” that lets you know the preceeding words are going to be negated by the following words.)
I want my ordinariness back by going through 9/11. Faced dead on, fully experienced, fully remembered and as the impetus to fight, not only for the ordinariness of my life, but also for the ordinariness of the future lives of my children and grandchildren. How nice when my grandsons start kindergarten that the biggest worry their mom will have is if they will like their teacher, not about if the school is a target for terrorists. How nice will it be if each approaching American holiday my grandsons’ experience will be excitement at the celebration with BBQ’s and fireworks, not threat levels and heightened security.
I realize I want to secure that ordinariness for them, as my parents and grandparents wanted the ordinariness for me when they faced fighting the fascism of their time.
It is an extraordinary responsibility that faces my generation; to both recognize the modern fascist ideology of Islamism, and to be dedicated to defeating it. And the defeat will not only be on battlefields, but will come within our hearts. It will come in defeating the nihilism that permeates our culture and holds us of the ordinary life responsible for the evilness of others. It is not easy and we will be tested again and again; but can we do less than what was asked of our parents and grandparents?
Today, I fly my flag, I offer my prayers to those lost and those that remain behind, I praise and feel pride in the men and women who are giving so much to me by being in United States Armed Forces.
Most of all, I wish for all my fellow citizens is a future of ordinariness.
Posted by Darleen at September 11, 2004 10:21 AM