this is not the first time I’ve gotten up in Jersey and
commuted to my job in the city. it is
not the first time I’ve been to the World Trade Center since 9/11, though I
avoided going downtown for years. this
is the first time that I have commuted via the PATH train through the rebuilt
tunnels under the collapse. i will never
forget the smell. it didn’t stop filling
my nostrils every time I stepped outside until after Thanksgiving. The fires
burned for months, our lesson still simmering beneath our feet.
it is not that first anniversary that I have been a mother:
last year I was knitting my hushed meditations in Michigan. But it is the first time I have carried my
child toward the past and asked him to look.
It is important that we see the world. Ms. Sampson’s quote
the other day spoke of the decision to separate ourselves and I have been
thinking about how we divide and categorize ourselves, how we make arbitrary
separations by the color of skin, by the god we pray to, the languages we learn
to express ourselves inside of.
all of us seek to be happy, to be free, to choose our lives,
be captains of our own vessels, and our pursuits will produce change, will
produce distance between you and others.
It is our job to warm the distance, to keep reaching out despite the
desire to distract us.
13 years later and I want to cry with how little the world
has changed. our sights have been set on
a new enemy, but the war is the same. our
president has a different face now, one that I voted for and believed could
possibly change the direction of this country, but his message of domination,
of destruction across the world, of “not tolerating terrorists” remains the
same.
america, we have not learned our lesson. I will keep teaching, I will keep speaking, I
will keep writing tirelessly, with no audience, because I need to believe that
my voice means something. I need to rock
myself and my son to sleep at night with the hope of a better world, a vision
for peace that is not passive, but that we can be active participants in a
world we shape with our hands.
9/11 means immense sadness, followed by a community of new yorkers
that I had never experienced before, and will never experience again. It means constant engagement with others in
the fight to teach on and teach ourselves into a place of understanding. It means reading and research and
understanding america’s role in the middle east as complex, as oppressive, as
dominion. It means loss of life, from the folks on the 102nd floor
of Tower 1, to the US soldiers deployed to defend our “freedom”, to the Iraqi
refugees and Afghani civilians who were
killed in our blind pursuit of justice by elimination a shape-shifting enemy.
but it also means recognizing the humanness of each person I
meet, speak to, see on the train, pass on the street, see in the news, or never
hear about, but has the same goals of respect, of being sustained by life, of
living to see 25, of freedom, of passion, of love and direction in an aimless
world. It means teaching toward a vision of humanity where empathy is crucial
to our daily lesson plan. as many things in my life unravel themselves, I am finding
myself in both/and situations instead of either/or, and i am welcoming the shift.
