[I love how it says 12:00 straight up on this entry. Mostly I love that the last angsty one is now archived instead of being the thing that defines me for 2 weeks.]
For no discernible reason, I've spent the past few days listening to and reading stuff written after September 11, 2001. It began with listening to a PRI program I worship and adore, This American Life, which approaches reporting with an intriguing collection of spoken essays and interviews with carefully-chosen background music and interludes. The program is done in three to four acts, each story based around a theme; on 9/21 the program was called "Before and After."
Act Two isn't about the WTC at all, but a tragedy which the fountain in its memory calls "The Worst Disaster in the history of New York." It was on June 15, 1904 that the members of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church boarded the steamship General Slocum for a picnic. It caught fire, and burned to a shell in just 15 minutes, killing 1,031 people - mostly women and children - from the all-German community of the church. "In the most painful and horrifying example of this great city's capacity to top itself and exceed all previous expectations," the reporter David Rakoff says, "the sign will now have to be changed."
I think it makes me feel sad and weary and driven to cry quietly here in my office these many years later because my disconnection to those lost both in the boat fire and the World Trade Center feels very profound. I didn't know anyone who died, I don't even know anyone well who lost someone, and yet I grieve, nearly two years later, with a sense that it will always feel this way to me, a stranger, and especially as bombs explode on unsuspecting people all over the world with alarming frequency. I don't feel exactly justified in my tears for the deaths of strangers and the terrible, intense fury and powerlessness I feel towards the people who embrace death and murder as an act of God, and yet maybe it is this disconnect which keeps the wounds of that day open.
Or maybe the reason that I've been listening and reading so many human responses is because the fury that fueled the acts never stops, just takes different structures and different people who aren't protected by the perverse and unsettling vigilance of the United States. The repetition is no less tragic.
Here's the other thing: I have, since that day, really wanted to write something. I wrote nothing when it actually happened, and I wrote some mawkish drivel last year on the date in a journal. I read it recently, and of course, it was less introspective analysis than bewilderment. I suspect it's because I don't quite know what's in my head - mostly there are disjointed and sad thoughts and this kind of void between them that says, "it didn't really happen to you." It happened to an old friend from college, it happened to my cousin, New Yorkers both at the time, but the friend of a friend of a friend doesn't seem allowable for big crying. So, in a sense, I feel dumb or false or hollow writing anything, and yet I want to own the grief for solidarity's sake. I want to hug it and comfort it. I can hear about the Germans and feel twingy because my dad is German - those people were a collection of immigrants who traveled through the same gates as my grandparents years ago, and somehow I feel a license to step into the space filled with that sadness. New York? I have never belonged.
It's not exactly like I want to relive what I felt that day, when I called my mom early in the morning on the West Coast and told her with a shaky voice to turn on the television, and then lay on the couch staring blankly at CNN for most of the evening clutching my woobie like a child. But listening and reading the story of tragedies connects me to humanity - forces me to consider how I handle diverse people and good and bad things. It reminds me of the lens through which I ought to be seeing things more clearly: the eye of faith would be a good place to start. The Master taught that I should mourn with those that mourn, and I like to to hope this is something like that.
