Mighty Neighborly, a regular feature on the Precipitate blog, explores how everyday, local decisions impact a larger community and the environment.
As I write this, it is September 11th, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. I hear this during my obsessive NPR listening, at my workplace where they’ve chosen that day as the annual faculty convocation, and in my dad’s emails, which have taken a decidedly less partisan tone in the past few days (we disagree on a few things).
Everyone is sad, sad, sad. I’m reminded of The Onion article that came out a few days after the attacks about a woman who baked a cake because she didn’t know what to do. That seemed about right at the time, and it still does. Most of the events or articles I’ve been hearing about include that tag line, “never forget,” including the most recent This American Life, which includes a brief conversation with a woman whose husband died. She wants to forget; she believes that you have to forget in order to heal, but people keep reminding her of the event.
I don’t know that forgetting is possible, but I was thinking about what it is that we’re supposed to remember. Is it the images from that day? I don’t think that anyone alive in the U. S. at the time, at least those who were old enough to understand, could ever forget what they saw: buildings burning, people falling, and smoke billowing out to nearly obscure The Statue of Liberty.
My calendar says tomorrow is Patriot Day. One thing I would like to remember is those first days when we grieved together, when most of the world grieved with us, and we remembered that we were one country. Although I was legally an adult before the attacks, I wasn’t very aware of politics or even of what happened to people who were not me and my immediate circle. I don’t remember being divided before the event, but I remember that just after, we were together. An image that’s just mine: my then-coworker and close friend, very visibly pregnant, standing with her husband, my then-boss. Seeing the two of them together watching the coverage on a tiny little T. V. whose presence in the office was until that time inexplicable, I thought that things would maybe be OK.
That feeling is what I would like to remember now that we are, in so many ways, divided. I would like to think that someday, we could have the Miss America dream. I know that patriotism is a word that’s been thrown around a lot, and it’s often a word that scares me. I think of the poem that I just taught about Colonel Shaw, who “could not bend his back,” and the credit we give to the idea of being uncompromising even if it means people get hurt.
Whether or not we “compromise,” something to remember is that our old idea of place has to change. Thinking about small things and the neighborhood is no excuse for failing to keep a weather-eye on the big picture. We know now that if (or rather, when) Pakistan runs out of water, India’s water starts to look pretty good. Boundaries have been eroded by migration and advances in transportation, and in cases such as the one I just mentioned, may be fairly recent inventions. So what is it that we mean by America, or any other nation? What is it that patriots proudly defend? Whether this country is a people, the land they live on, or an ideal, we need to think a lot bigger.
My fancy recycled toilet paper tells me about a Native American tradition of considering how a decision will affect the next seven generations. The land, those elders say, also belongs to their grandchildren. We’re hearing that same logic now in talks about our deficit. I would add to that looking forward a looking from side to side. Our neighbors are not only those who share the fence to our yard. We have fences around the country, too.
H. V. Cramond, Staff Blogger