News & Features Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Ripple effect (continued)



National holiday

It was over drinks with co-workers at the sleek, swank Ambrosia — not exactly the place for one of life’s little epiphanies. And it came only recently, nearly a year after the September 11 attacks that were its origin. But there it was, an epiphany nonetheless, and I had to set my colorful cocktail down on the bar and steady myself.

It came during a conversation about what we were each planning to do on the first anniversary of the attacks. Go to work? Be with family? Hole up in the house with the blinds closed, drawn to the blue flickering light of the television screen as we were on that date a year ago? "I bet most businesses will be closed," remarked one of my companions, words delivered in a tone so casual I did not expect to be struck by their weight. "September 11 will probably end up being a national holiday."

And there it was. A holiday. The conversation moved on, but I was held there in that moment, suspended in the blur of realization. For most of my three decades on this planet, holidays have been commemorations of things that happened before. Back then. In another time, another place, far removed from me. I’ll take the days off, use them for long-weekend trips north, shopping excursions, the occasional scrubbing-down of my apartment. But they’re just that: days off, to spend as I see fit, and, more than likely, to enjoy at my leisure.

There will be, for me, no enjoyment in a September 11 holiday. Because for the first time, it will be a holiday honoring a date, an event, a cataclysm, that occurred in my lifetime. A day of which my mind has ever-stinging memories, because of which my nights are still interrupted with dreams of deadly, doomed planes and crumpled, burning buildings.

September 11. A date that may someday be noted on the calendars of those who come after me, marking the anniversary of something that happened before, back then. The children I haven’t yet had will take their holiday gladly, relish the release from school with early-fall games of kickball in the street. But in the midst of the slow, carefree celebration of unfettered hours, perhaps, if I am lucky, they will ask: why?

And I will tell them.

Because I remember.

— Tamara Wieder

New beginnings

Last September 11, I felt grateful. Not because I was alive, but because my daughter wasn’t. At least not quite. I was five months pregnant.

From the moment I learned I was pregnant until the moment it dawned on me that we were under attack, one thought would strike randomly, shooting adrenaline through my body when I was in the shower, in line at the coffee shop, doing laundry, talking with co-workers: I cannot believe I’m pregnant! On September 11 and afterward, I never experienced that again. Being pregnant finally lost its novelty and felt natural. I had a job to do — the most important one I’ve ever had, and I was getting it done.

Now I have a seven-month-old. She’s a happy baby. And another thought strikes at random moments: My mother was pregnant with me when JFK was assassinated. I was pregnant with Helen when those planes hit the towers.

Some day Helen may know what it’s like to live through a tragedy that stops the world in its tracks. But in this year, this month, on this one-year anniversary of horror, she’s never known that feeling. Not even close.

— Susan Ryan-Vollmar

In the line of ire

Every bar has its share of bores. There’s the guy who, once he’s got a few Buds in him, will give you a blow-by-blow account of the time he ran 8000 yards in a high-school football game. There’s the guy who insists on telling you everything you never wanted to know about data management. There’s the incoherent guy who sputters little white flecks of mouth matter into your beer. And then there’s me. Since September 11, I’ve become what you might call an Al Qaeda bore.

It happens pretty much every time I have one too many. I’ll square my shoulders (as much as I can under the circumstances), look you right between the eyes, and start in on how the terrorist network needs to be "crushed." I say the word as though telling someone to be quiet in a movie theater: "Crushhhed!" The sentiment is, I’m sure, generally accompanied by a liberal spattering of beer-tainting, lip-finding spit. But I don’t care. When you’re talking about crushing Al Qaeda, there’s little room for such trifles as decorum.

I can’t be sure, but I suspect the regulars at my local are starting to avoid me. They know that if they lend me an ear, I’ll claim full ownership. Once I get started on the subject of Abu Zubaydah, people will remember that their beer is down the other end of the bar, or they have to pop out to get cigarettes. They never return. And so, like all barroom bores, I must constantly ferret for new victims. About a week ago, I found one. "Nice jacket," I said. "Reminds me of the one Mohamed Atta was wearing." I made a pestle with my fist, grinding Al Qaeda into the palm of my hand. "Crushhhed!" Poor bastard didn’t know what hit him.

I used to consider myself a fairly easygoing guy. No more. Since September 11, I’ve become bellicose, warlike. I’m like Genghis Khan after somebody keyed his horse. I’ll swear blind that, given the opportunity, I’d be on the first plane to Tora Bora, a hunting knife clenched between my teeth, ready to eviscerate Osama myself. In a sober state, I’m fully aware that coming face to face with an unarmed, one-legged, no-fingered holy warrior would be enough to send me running for the hills (or away from the hills, depending on where his comrades were), but when I’m on the wrong side of six Newcastle Browns, I am absolutely fearless. I’ll puke the fuckers to death if I have to.

As tiresome as it might be for the unfortunates who find themselves within earshot of my anti-terrorist tirades, it’s worse for me. For me, the conversation never ends. Every morning, I scour the papers for the latest scrap of Rumsfeldian misinformation. At night, I trawl the news magazines for Pakistan analysis and Afghan punditry. I check the AP wire every 15 minutes to see if someone’s been captured, killed. I find myself wondering what I used to read before September 11.

So the next time I’m bin Ladening you to tears, have a little sympathy. Remember: you can get away. I am stuck with myself. I am stuck with the fury that has been building up in my chest over the past year, like pennies being dropped into a jar. This is why I go on and on about Al Qaeda, and then go on and on some more. I need to get this stuff off my chest. I am tired of being weighed down with Osama hatred, Atta hatred, Omar fucking Saeed Sheikh hatred — a deep, debilitating hatred for all those people who wish to do us harm. They need to be crushed. Crushhhed!

But please, for your sake, don’t get me started.

— Chris Wright

The danger around us

On a hot afternoon in late August I arrived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, to learn more about the fate of the disabled under the Nazis.

The historian whom I was planning to interview had told me where I would find her office once I got through security. Yet the full import of that word — "security" — didn’t register until I actually arrived. A friend zipped right through. But I — encumbered by a tape recorder, a cell phone, a Palm Pilot, even a Swiss Army knife — immediately ran into trouble.

I took a few things out of my pockets and tried to walk through the metal detector. Beep. A guard told me, this time, take everything out. I tried to do as I was told, but I set off the alarm again — and realized I still had my Palm Pilot on me. I removed it, and sent that through the x-ray machine along with every other piece of metal I’d had on me. The guard seemed irritated but remained polite. Finally, I was allowed to go through.

It was only later that I connected the strict security procedures at the museum with the terrorist attacks of last September 11. This was my first visit to the Holocaust Museum, and maybe — probably — what I had run into was no different from the way things had always been there. But the screening struck me as important and serious in ways that would have been inconceivable before 9/11.

How many times over the years have we gone through metal detectors? How many times have we dumped our change and our pocket knives and our cell phones into plastic trays so they could run through an x-ray machine? There’s nothing exactly new about such things. But how often, until this past year, did we really connect such precautions with the possibility that carelessness could kill us, and everyone around us?

In ways that I wouldn’t have suspected a year ago, the country has returned to normal. Pop culture is once again as stupid and trivial as it was before 9/11. Vast segments of the news media — particularly the all-news cable channels — have resumed their downward spiral into utter irrelevance following a brief uptick in seriousness. But mediated reality is one thing; the actual reality of our daily lives still feels different, suffused with an ill-defined fear and danger that just weren’t there before.

Walking through the Holocaust Museum, awakened by the security check, I sensed the danger. Surrounding us was the legacy of anti-Semitism, and of what happens when the veneer of civilization crumbles. September 11 showed us how little really has changed — that of all the hatreds in the world, hatred of the Jews remains the most potent and the most dangerous, and that Israel and its principal ally, the United States, will not be safe as long as these hatreds run rampant.

Toward the end of our tour, we walked beneath a metal gate emblazoned with the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI — "Work Brings Freedom," the lie that greeted those arriving at Auschwitz. I wondered what would happen if the museum building came under attack right then. I wondered what I would do. Or what any of us would do.

— Dan Kennedy

page 1  page 2  page 3  page 4 

Issue Date: September 5 - 12, 2002
Back to the News & Features table of contents.
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group