March 11th, 2002
The Past Six Months
In the past six months, a lot has changed.
Certainly, the first changes were felt the moment the first plane hit the first tower. From that moment, we were not the same nation we had been the day before, and we knew it.
Since the attacks, a lot has happened. We've been at war in Afghanistan ever since, wiping out the Taliban. Our economy has taken a series of hits, first from the prudent closure of the New York Stock Exchange, then from a variety of other factors. People in Manhattan have been trying to clean up and get on with their lives as much as they can. Our President's popularity has bounced up and down like a yo-yo (though it has mostly remained high).
Since the attacks we've been able to take inventory of our losses. In my own life, I have been lucky. As mentioned on previous pages, I did not lose any friends or loved ones in the attacks. Being 3000+ miles away from New York, I didn't lose my sense of safety in the same way that people at Ground Zero did. My losses have been mostly intangible.
And frankly, some of the things I've lost, I don't miss at all. I lost a significant other who resented my need to contact him on 9/11; but frankly I don't think I want to be with someone who would fault their loved ones for needing to make contact when something like this happens. (How shallow can you be?) I lost a sense of triviality, but I sure don't mind that at all -- why do I really need to worry myself with useless stuff?
Since that day I have a different perspective. I suspect a lot of people do. I just look around at life and realize, you know? Most of the stuff we worry about is just pointless bullshit. Money, a better job, a bigger house, a nicer car, a trophy partner, who fucking cares? None of those things were exceptionally important to me before 9/11; but y'know, they're even more irrelevant now. I sure don't find myself worrying about the same kind of stuff now that I did on September 10th.
For one thing, I no longer see the point in being self-conscious. Neither do I feel like I want to waste time not knowing what I want do to in life. I actually made a list recently of all the things I want to do or see before I die, and I plan to at least try to accomplish all of them before my time is up. Art school, traveling, seeing my family more, keeping in contact with old friends, spirituality; these are the important things. Everything else is just bullshit.
It's hard to explain what else has happened since then. I've noticed myself that, while we have moved on in some ways as a country, in others we haven't. It's as if we can't. Frankly, I don't think that's a bad thing. If we move too far from what happened, we run the risk of forgetting it or dismissing it or somehow minimizing it, and I'm very opposed to that possibility. It does no honor to the thousands of people dead, and the many more thousands traumatized by the attacks, for us to forget.
And in any case, reality is something so much bigger than any of us. We were attacked by terrorists, whether we forget it or not. We will never be the same, whether we ignore what happened or not.