The Day We Were All New Yorkers

Even if I hadn’t looked at a calendar, I would have known today was 9/11. I get a heavy, somber feeling each year, when I wake up on this day. 

This year feels sadder to me than most. Not because I’ve been back in New York for thirteen years, but because 9/11 united a country that is now sorely divided.

It seems sacrilegious to say that 9/11 was a good moment for our country in any way, but in some ways, it was.

I was living in Tennessee in 2001, and prior to that day, I had been referred to as a Yankee, a Northerner, and on occasion, “you people.” 

The division in attitude came as a shock to me, when I moved to Nashville, because, in all honesty, I had never grown up thinking of any part of the United States as separate or different, other than in dialect, from another.

The five years I was in Nashville prior to 9/11 taught me otherwise. The South has more than its own dialect, it has its own culture, and in consciousness at least, it was very much its own separate entity.

Then 9/11 happened, and for one brief, beautiful moment, we were all Americans. That day, everyone was a New Yorker. And the people around me cared very much if my family was okay, my friends, everyone I knew back home.

For one instant, all the things that made me different didn’t matter.

On that day, we were united in our grief and our steadfastness. And being attacked as a democracy, we were reminded how very precious and sacred our freedom was. It was something our enemies would kill for and our citizens would die for.

I have been pondering that moment a lot lately. There is so much separation and discord now, that I don’t know if faced with the same kind of attack today, if we would come together or fall apart entirely. 

I would like to think that neighbor would stand shoulder to should with neighbor, sifting through rubble and donating blood.

I would like to think that we might remember that the great experiment of our democracy is worth resurrecting from its current state of hanging on by a thread.

I would like to think that out of the ashes, our former greatness could rise once more, that we still have it in us.

I would like to think these things, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know if we can salvage our air and water, or voting rights, or autonomy over our individual bodies, or equality, whether racial, marital, or gender.

I don’t know whether the rule of law can survive the vast disparity between how it is applied to different citizens, or the unregulated media masquerading as news, untethered to truth, and unyielding in its vitriol.

I just don’t know.

And in my darker moments, I’m not sure a society is worth saving if it is devoid of common decency and any shred of compassion.

But in my brighter moments, I still have hope. I have to, because as I listen to the annual reading of the names that perished on this day, I do not want their sacrifice to have been in vain. 

 

So I press on, knowing that those of us who remember 9/11 vividly, have a responsibility to try and preserve democracy. We have the difficult task before us of loving one another amid the differing views and beliefs, amid the varying cultures and demographics, amid the voices screaming for our attention and our division. 

 

I press on, knowing that our survival is dependent on me seeing you, whomever you are, as more like me than not. And at the end of the day, I press on for the sake of generations to follow, in the hopes that they will put down the guns that so many cherish more than life, and come to the table with an open heart and willing spirit. 

 

So on this 22^nd anniversary of 9/11, I want to offer up a thought AND a prayer – that we may unclench our fists and lend a hand, that we may forfeit our separation for unity, and heed the voice of our better angels when they ask us to choose love.