A reflection (starting from the 5th paragraph or so) from a NYT editor. I imagine this is a provocative piece, from the general popular American point of view.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/09/opinion/09iht-edcohen09.html?ref=global---
Op-Ed Columnist
Imagining 9/11
By ROGER COHEN
Published: September 8, 2011
BELLAGIO, ITALY — My daughter turned four that day. She was in my arms as my wife and I ran down Remsen Street to the Brooklyn Promenade. Smoke from the towers was thickening into a churning cloud. Papers from incinerated brokerage houses fluttered across the East River beneath that sky I think of now as 9/11 blue.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Journalists are bound to observe which way people are moving and go in the opposite direction. I boarded the No. 2 train at Clark Street. The woman next to me was fighting back tears. Her brother was in the North Tower, she thought. I tried to console her. The subway, one of the last to run, passed beneath the inferno to Times Square.
It was my first day in a new job as an editor. I’d been at my desk 10 minutes when, at 9:59 a.m., the South Tower came down. Adrenalin kicked in: the alchemy of newspapering. Grief suppressed only became irrepressible a couple of days later. A woman searching for her lost husband had tacked to a wall an ultrasound showing an unborn child who would now grow up fatherless. That did it.
The fires burned, fed by molten steel buried deep. They burned for weeks. Sometimes, in certain winds, the acrid-sweet smell below Canal Street carried into Brooklyn, an emetic reminder of what the fires had consumed.
I remember that. One thing 9/11 teaches, a decade on, is that memory is treacherous. It is ever shifting and unscientific, close to imagination, as distinct from history as emotion from form.
How many times since that day have I listened to people around the world expound on their theory of what really happened, based on what they believe they saw. No conspiracy has proved too outlandish or too foul to entertain. I’ve had to restrain myself.
Tell me your 9/11 and I’ll tell you who you are.
Joseph Brodsky once wrote: “If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.” That’s not a bad definition of what the best journalism does: restore intimacy. The Portraits of Grief that appeared in The New York Times for months after the attack hit home because they undercut, through the particulars of single lives, Stalin’s formula: Murder en masse and loss becomes a mere statistic.
There followed the nation’s loss — of direction. The early 20th century was a period of giddy American expansion. The early 21st century has been a period of gathering American doubt. The American Century is behind us; this one still seeks its epithet among the emergent powers. What role the attack played in this reshaping of the globe, and what part of it is attributable to the inexorable currents of history, is an open question.
I’d say the power shift was inevitable but accelerated by 9/11 and by chance. Hanging chads contributed. The United States found itself with an accidental president. He took the nation into two wars without preparing the nation for sacrifice. His righteousness brooked no questioning. Irresponsibility was allied to conviction, a heinous marriage. Self-delusion is the mother of perdition. Wars killed. Wall Street made killings. “Whatever” became the watchword of maxed-out Americans; and in time things fell apart.
When they do, extreme ideologies thrive. There must be an enemy within. Scapegoats must be found, compromise crushed. The most devastating effect of 9/11 has been the polarization of America and the incubation of hatred.
The national interest has lost out to settling scores or whipping up bigotry. It is the manipulation of memory — not fit remembrance — that has turned an attack by a band of fanatical Muslims into grounds for the grotesque attempt to ban Shariah law in several U.S. states, and to scurrilous imaginings about President Obama and Islam.
There is a coda to this decade: Hope. Arabs have risen up by the hundreds of millions to claim a dignity and freedom long denied them. The kleptocratic tyrannies they lived under were production lines for the fanaticism behind 9/11; the hypocrisy of Western support for those tyrannies was a great propaganda tool for terrorists. As America has learned of late, change is hard. It will be uneven in the Arab world. But in this transformation a constructive answer to 9/11 is at last being traced.
On one of those scraps of paper that fluttered over the East River I found these words written to my daughter: “I am leaving this world on your birthday. Remember what you see. Write it down. This is what hatred does. Go forth. Embrace love. Seek understanding. Anything can happen. I don’t know if God exists. It might be better for His reputation if He didn’t.”
My little girl is now an adolescent poised on the fulcrum between childhood and womanhood. She used to say her birthday was famous but she’s not. She used to say her birthday is on the day the towers came down. Now she says nothing. That seems wise. There’s enough noise. Silence is remembrance.
I never gave her that note from a departed soul because in fact I imagined it.
