APW2001091209873

The sun rises over Manhattan, September 12th, 2001.

I grew up during the decade we are ready to leave behind.

I was seventeen years old, and a junior in high school, when Al Gore lost the presidency by judicial fiat. I remember reading excerpts from Bush v. Gore in the New York Times in the cafeteria, a place that I always thought I’d recall more for its unpleasant and strangely unidentifiable odors than for its role in the formation of my political consciousness. That was how my decade began: as a passive spectator, unable to vote, disturbed by the news that four men and a single woman had decided who the president was going to be. But that wasn’t really the start of the decade.

Periodization is a central task of the historian; it is as much a political decision as it is an academic one, and it always does violence to the unbroken continuity within which we live our lives. And it is an almost-noxious cliché to say that “everything changed” on September 11th, 2001, because, of course, everything didn’t. But it is true that so much did change in the days and weeks and months and years that followed, so much so that it seemed like time compressed and became denser and more foreboding, that it is easy now to look back at those burning towers and see a searing, vicious break with the past.

At least it was for me. I went to public high school in suburban Westchester County, New York, in a community where stockbroker’s kids sat next to the children of their hired help in math class; where affluenza co-existed with pernicious poverty; where I took for granted all that was given to me and the debt that I owed to so many for my comfortable, privileged, and altogether boring existence. I think about that a lot now, and my heart aches because I realize I wasted years where I could’ve been thanking my parents for all they gave to me and all that they strived for. I thank them now, but time cannot be recovered.

Westchester was one of America’s first bedroom communities, and the parents of many of my classmates (myself included), commuted everyday to Manhattan for work. So there was understandable chaos when the first tower was hit. So many of us had members of our immediate family in the city at the time, and no small number worked in the financial district. We were not allowed to leave our classrooms. Things became hushed, except for the primal and lachrymose noises that make us feel flaccid and inexplicably heavy and then alternatively jittery, like the animals we are.

The second tower was hit. No accident. No going back. We’re still being forced to stay in the same damn room. Eventually all classes are canceled, but we’re not allowed to leave the school. Lockdown. I’m in the same cafeteria again with friends, and we’re speculating about the death toll. We think it could be hundreds of thousands, maybe close to a million. We didn’t know, because no one knew anything. All the phones are jammed. I’m holding that day’s New York Times, and it feels utterly worthless and alien. So much information, but all of it is useless.

Eventually, a friend and I decide to sneak out of the building. We go to the basement, and through the passageway reserved for the janitorial staff. We pass by their office. They’re all sitting there. They don’t care about our minor transgression; not only that, but we sit down with them. I bum a menthol cigarette and smoke it in their office. I run out of the building and to my car. I’m free.

In the weeks that followed, American flags bloomed out of every corner and crevice. I was repeatedly made aware of the fact via homemade banners that “These Colors Don’t Run.” I began to dread something – dread it in the Kierkegaardian sense that my foreboding was accompanied by a pre-sentiment of horror. (Being unaware of Kierkegaard at the time, I had no idea that this was “Kierkegaardian.”) It lacked a target, a definitive object, but I walked around with a vague sense of nausea about what was to come.

It’s been observed that language is rooted in sensory experience, but that words are slowly effaced of their immediate and visceral origins. So any discussion of the Bush administration’s “drumbeat to war” in Iraq risks circumventing the metaphor’s core truth. War is a rhythm. It is a state of consciousness, and its destructive force extends far beyond the battlefield. Before a single shot was fired in Iraq or Afghanistan, we were at war.

The Bush administration fostered an environment of soft, soporific despotism. They used a terrorist attack to encourage a culture of being terrorized, one where we were left intellectually neutered and fed a steady and bizarrely addictive regimen of fear. In the end, they did more damage to the long-term collective health of the American body politic than Al Qaeda, which is terrible and tragic and absurd, like slipping on a banana peel and falling on your own knife.

It would be exhausting to list all of the high crimes and misdemeanors of that small coterie, but the magnitude of a few and the extent to which they shape the world we now live necessitate it. Abu Ghraib. Warrantless wiretaps. Guantanamo. Color-coded terror alerts. Katrina. Iraq. Iraq. Iraq. This is the Bush administration’s decade, no doubt about it.

I attended two very large protests in New York City in February and March of 2003, and they were exhilarating. Sometimes I wonder if I my reasons for attending were selfish; that I was more invested in absolving myself of responsibility from the impending death and destruction than I was interested in the best way to prevent it. But I didn’t, and still don’t, know what else could be done. Power is an awesome thing to behold, and millions pushing back against the inevitable is equally encouraging and dispiriting because, as liberating as it feels to know that your hearts ache in equal measure, you’re still destitute and defeated in the end. You realize that willpower is not enough. It couldn’t raise the Pentagon then and it can’t stop the war now.

During the protest we were periodically corralled in by police officers on horseback. An officer almost crushed a protester with his horse. A small black woman, wizened, churchgoing, serene, told me that in the 1960s she would keep marbles in her pocket so when police on horseback attacked civil rights protesters they could roll the marbles under the horses’ hoofs, disorienting them. I wish I could speak to her again. I’d tell her that traveling hours to New York, standing in the frigid cold, being crushed by thousands in the wax and wane of organized dissent, was all worth it for that one minute.

I was in India in the fall of 2004. Every time I met an Indian Muslim he would immediately ask me what I thought of George Bush. The only people I met who loved our president in India were right wing Hindus who thought he was waging a war on Muslims, which they admired. In 2002, an organized anti-Muslim pogrom had occurred in the western state of Gujarat, leading to the massacre of hundreds. If the clash of civilizations didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent one.

The night of the 2004 elections I was on a twenty-four hour train trip across India where everyone slept on cramped, undersized bunk beds. I woke up in the morning, and heard a man over the loudspeaker say something unintelligible in Hindi and then “George Bush.” I rolled over and burst into tears.

Then I got up, had some chai, and stared out at the huts made of cow patties.

It took a lot of death and suffering in Iraq and southern Louisiana to emasculate the Bush administration, and we tend to think more about Bush’s hapless and impotent later years then his first term because it’s just easier to forget; besides, we knew that his time would end soon enough and whatever was coming had to be better than what we had now. But I don’t know if anyone could have predicted the raw intensity caused by the possibility of Barack Obama serving as Bush’s successor; people who I knew to be relatively apathetic became evangelists – true political born-agains. The possibility of something better returned, and that was enough.

I was in Chicago on election night, and I saw Obama’s victory speech. I thought I would be elated – I had spent many hours working to get him elected, and far more time obsessing over election-related minutiae – but all I felt was relief. Relief and exhaustion. I wanted to sleep, like I hadn’t slept in years.

I don’t think my story is extraordinary in any way, or that its forms a neat narrative arc that crystallizes the experiences of those in my cohort; but I do think that we are a product of our collective historical memories, which we produce together, and there are certain events that impress upon on us first principles of knowledge, cutting the lens through which we see the world like a diamond. They refract and shape who we are, indelibly.

I don’t know the psychological roots of this phenomenon, but I venture this is why youth is referred to as one’s “formative years.” We are always being re-formed, in a constant continuum, singing a song of ourselves.

I do think, however, that we became adults (we grew “up”) during a time when human beings’ capacity for both unfettered evil and radical decency was made plain. And that, to some degree, has defined us. In a very short span, we witnessed one of the most intense and concentrated acts of brutality in our nation’s history, followed by eight years of seriously corrupt, incompetent, and arrogant rule, which was then – and only then – followed by a thoroughly decent man being propelled into power by the transformational energy of others, including, notably, a large number of my peers.

So I’m unsure how to feel about the end of the current decade. I want to say good riddance, but I can’t: too many good people invested themselves in the work of tikkun olam, in healing and repairing our world, even when it looked like there would be nothing left to heal and only shattered bits to repair. But I can’t discount the amount of evil I saw, either. When I look at those burning towers I shudder, because I don’t want to be burned up in them, because I’m aware that just as war begins before a shot is fired, evil ripples through people in concentric circles, outliving its source like light from a burned-out star. So all I can say is goodbye, and farewell.


Bookmark and Share