Remembering 9/11: The Things We Carry

I was at work. Tired. Not quite awake after spending a goodly amount of my sleep allotment writing a song the night before. 

I drifted down to the break room, sluggishly snaked around the few men filling the space, put two quarters in the coffee machine, and bent to straighten the cup. At fifty-cents a shot, I didn't want to waste a drop. As I straightened, lifting the black gold to my lips, I became aware of silence. 

No one was talking. 

Everyone stood like marble staring at the small TV hung from the ceiling, and from which no sound came because the volume was always set to mute.

I looked up. At first I thought it was a movie. Then I thought something must have happened to the pilot, or there was some serious mechanical or electronic failure. All those poor people! How did this happen? Where did this happen? New York? America? 


Over and over the plane exploded into one of the twin towers while speculation spread across the bottom of the screen in captions. Then, in the silence of that room, the second plane rammed the other tower. That's when I knew this was no accident. That's when I knew we were at war. That's when everything changed. Everything.

I wanted to go back into uniform that instant. I wanted to make someone pay for this. I wanted to kill someone or something...reality maybe. I turned around, threaded my way back through the room, back to my cubicle and to my C++ coding project. 

I could still hear the explosions, the screams, the metal ripping, the concrete tearing apart beneath my feet. Heat continued to melt my skin. My throat remained closed against the toxic smoke. From the sight trapped inside that silent screen I carried the bodies of so many people I would never know. By the look on my coworkers' faces I could see we all did, as we sat in our cubicles trying to work or wandered through the makeshift halls, helpless.

We would carry all of them for a long, long time.

We would bear them past the first shock, past the first thirsty cries for war, and past the branding of the national trauma as "9/11." We would shoulder them beyond calls for thinking it through before war, and beyond national fervor crushing anyone who dared express anti-war sentiments as though that were synonymous with not supporting the troops. We would drag them through discovering that justifications for one war-front were built on lies, through war crimes, and through growing national anti-war sentiment. We would lug them through scandals of rapes and sexual assaults of female and male soldiers, airmen, marines, sailors, and coast guards by their brothers-in-arms. We would tote them through injustices to veterans and to the very soldiers we asked to give us justice for 9/11. We would haul them past giving up our rights and freedoms, and past the end of Osama Bin Laden--the architect of 9/11. 

We would shlep them through upheavals of nations straining toward justice and freedom, through the global fight to survive hunger and poverty, and through the worldwide battle of women and girls struggling for human rights and equal dignity.

We would carry them to this day. And on their backs we carry all we have learned about ourselves and our world.

If we cannot yet lay them to rest, perhaps it is because we have still to honor their courage, sacrifice, and burden with the creation of a more just, equal, and benevolent world. A world less full of hate and divisions. A world that acknowledges that what divides us is not nearly as important as what unites us.