America: September 12, 2011

Yesterday marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. For most of those ten years, I have had strongly suspected that the terrorist won. Although, like most of the sports teams I root for, we have lost the game as much as they have won it.

One of bin Laden's goals was war between America and Muslim countries. He certainly achieved this goal. And America's military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and drone attacks in Pakistan, have bolstered anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world, and beyond, breeding more zealots willing to sacrifice themselves against our unIslamic might.

Another goal was to bankrupt the U.S.. According to Brown University's Cost of War project, the total cost of the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq is estimated at over $3.2 trillion (not including the over 225,000 lives lost and another 7,800,000 people displaced). Note that this is the equivalent of the US's budget deficit for the last three years combined. And while the country certainly has felt bankrupt, both monetarily and spiritually, it is our own economic policies, poor regulation, and greed that did most of the damage there.

Whether or not it was a goal of bin Laden or the terrorist attacks, where we have lost the most is the lessening of the very way of life we Americans claim to have been so proud of. To quote Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

But that is exactly what America has done over and over again during the last ten years.

The attacks of 9/11 were horrible. We lost 2,977 innocent people, not all of whom were American. We saw the Twin Towers, symbols as well as realities of our global economy, come crashing down. It was scary.

But I am still more scared of how the country has changed since then. We have lost sight of our belief in human rights and justice for all.

Our country once lead the way in punishing those who tortured, but now we hold detainees for years without charges, have used waterboarding and other torture and humiliation to gather information (despite studies that show that torture doesn't work), we return suspects to countries where they will be tortured, and when we do any of this to someone innocent of terror we refuse to make amends for what we have done.

Americans have had their rights removed for some alleged greater good. The government has been allowed to spy upon us without any basis or legal warrant. For these last ten years, we have had to submit to all sorts of absurd rules, regulations, and searches just to board an airplane, despite allowing all sorts of exceptions for children and medial conditions, or more importantly catching any of the people who have boarded with bombs. Here is somewhere a simple cost-benefit analysis would show we are getting no bang for our buck (although folks try to tell me that it makes people feel safer, to which I reply, "Not me.")

American belief in religious freedom seems to have died a tragic death, given the reports of opposition to building mosques around the country. I cannot see what is to be feared from a place of worship, or how any American can justify this religious intolerance. All of this only adds fuel to the fire burning around the world that American is anti-Islamic.

Then there is the short-sightedness of Twenty-First century Americans who do not know or think of the earlier wars between the West and Islam, when the Pope called for European kings to sent forces off to Jerusalem to crusade against the occupying Muslims, attacking them to preserve the Christian faith and recapture the Holy Land. And now here we are with radical Islamic leaders urging forces to go attack Western countries to preserve their Islamic faith and way of life.

10 years later

The morning of Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, I woke up a little after 7AM PT as usual. I turned on the television to get the weather forecast as usual, but the local news was not on. Instead I joined the coverage of the terrorist attacks on America already in progress. By that point, all the planes involved in the attacks had crashed and South Tower had already collapsed. It was a lot of information to process in my half-awake state.

After briefly wondering whether I was still dreaming, I started sobbing. I knew one college friend worked in one of the Towers, and I had a number of other friends and family in New York City. I was scared, both personally and as an American. America had been attacked.

Unsure what else to do, I took the bus in to work. The people riding on the bus were also scared. They talked about the possibility that there could be an attack here in Seattle, but it seemed unlikely to me. For one thing, they had already grounded all planes by then.

In the days that followed, one of the oddest things was not having any planes in the sky. Between Sea-Tac, Boeing Field, and flocks of seaplanes, you often see planes in the skies here. The empty skies in the days post-9/11 were an eerie reminder of what had happened. It might have been even more noticeable to me as, in the months prior to the attacks, I had the oddest sense when I looked up at a plane in the sky that I needed to keep willing it to fly. That feeling stopped after the attacks.

At work, we sat around the conference room and watched the news on the television we had. At some point, I was able to get in touch with Herb, my friend who had worked in the Tower. It turned out that he had gone to a baseball game with a mutual friend the night before and had planned to go in to work late. The attack began before he left home. His whole department got out before their Tower collapsed, but he was spared the horror of being there. My cousin, Michael, worked across the street from the Towers, and did see firsthand things that our own news did not show (but could be seen on Spanish-speaking stations around the country).

Another thing I remember from that time is the news coverage. I did not have cable at this point and all the television would show me was the attacks over and over again. I had cable within a week.

There was also the sense in those early days that Americans could unite, could transform this tragedy in to something positive. I know that some people acted on this and did create positive changes for themselves and others, but our government failed to channel our collective horror and rage at what had happened in to anything useful. Maybe that is part of why we have turned on one another more and more.

For myself, I knew I needed something to deal with the grief and sense of violation I had following these attacks. My "therapy" was making origami cranes. I did not know how to make them when I started. Using the instructions that came with the origami paper and some from the Internet, I was able to figure out how to do it. The first cranes I made were imperfect, but I've kept them as I felt they reflect the state of the world at that time. I found the act of creation, the focus and simplicity of folding, to be soothing in that time of upheaval and uncertainty. At first, I gave them to my coworkers and friends as signs of comfort and hope. Soon, the question of what to do with all the cranes arose. I decided to make a chain of cranes, one for each day of the year from 9/11/2001-9/11/2002. From January 1st 2002, I made a crane a day, placing them in a trifle dish by my bed. It gave me an interesting sense of time passing. When I laid them out to string up, each Tuesday was a large crane, so that the weeks could easily be seen, and I marked every 11th first with black, then gray, and then white. It starts in black and blue and purple (the colors of bruises), going into red, white, and blue. Holidays tend to be sparkly metallic. I put those first imperfect cranes at the start of the chain, mainly after the surge of patriotic red, white, and blue. On the morning of September 11th 2002, I hung my string of 366 cranes on the miniature Statue of Liberty on Alki where I was living.

Ten years later, I am thankful (although not celebratory) that bin Laden was killed and that Ground Zero is more than the gaping hole I saw in December 2004. Today, I will leave it at that, and simply remember those who died not necessarily knowing what had happened, and those who died trying to save others--from the first responders at the Towers to the passengers on United 93.

Reflections

I made it kayaking Thursday. The water at times was like a mirror, providing a second view of the world. It was disorienting at times in a beautiful.

The most dizzying disorientingly wonderful experience I have had with this effect was sailing down the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the Fortuna. It was around sunset and I looked down into the sepia water and thought I saw all these big rocks below the surface. I watched apprehensively over the side, marveling at how close they seemed. At some point I realized that there were no rocks, just the reflection of the puffy clouds overhead.