With its tenth anniversary coming up, there's been a lot of discussion about 9/11, about what it meant for the security of America, what we lost, what we learned, and what it did as a whole to our collective idea of "America" as an entity. In the last ten years we've all watched as politicians used the events of this day ten years ago for their own ends. Notably, there has been a lot of insistence that the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC were larger attacks on America (which is absolutely true), and that Americans as a whole were affected.
But how were they affected? Certainly we were all a lot more afraid of the world outside our borders, but the overarching message that was constructed immediately following the attacks, that America is some organic unity held fast by our bonds as citizens quickly eroded in the years that followed. We became afraid not only of the world outside our borders, but of the citizens we hitherto hadn't paid much attention to. Suddenly we employed terrible racial epithets toward ANYONE who appeared Middle Eastern on a mass scale and all but declared open season on unchecked hostility toward foreigners of Middle Eastern origin.We also agreed that extreme invasions of privacy were entirely warranted, thereby casting aspersions on the citizens who had previously been our closest and most trusted friends and family in the days following the attacks.
And yet at the same time, domestic terrorism perpetrated by white Americans like Timothy McVeigh became a distant memory as greater and greater numbers of citizens began to suspect that any and every Muslim was capable of orchestrating another catastrophe (ahem). This sort of footwork enabled us to keep on peddling the "All of America was affected by 9/11" rhetoric without seeming to actually deprive American citizens of any of their rights because we began profiling and vilifying specific ethnic and cultural groups. They became the enemy and Americans began to regard them as potential threats, only posing as American citizens.
Of course, this is an old, old process that has probably gone on as long as the idea of a unified, homogenous society has existed. But I find its application this time of year troubling, probably because of the fact that we did very little as a society to ensure that the people who were the most affected by the attacks on September 11 were well cared for mere days following the collapse of the towers in lower Manhattan. What's more, those family members of 9/11 victims who opposed the war on terror were openly mocked and insulted.
For workers who breathed in the contaminated air resulting from the collapse, it was a long uphill battle before they were finally granted the right to receive affordable health care to treat the illnesses they had incurred as a direct result of responding to the crises before, during and/or after the collapse of the buildings. What's more, the EPA was pressured to lie about the quality of the air in lower Manhattan, urging residents of NYC to return to work in the financial district on Sept. 17 in spite of the fact that the air was seriously contaminated with dioxins.
According to Mother Jones and ProPublica (linked directly above), there was a political push immediately following the attacks to get back to some semblance of normalcy as soon as possible. Since NYC became symbolic of the larger attack on America, then to them I suppose it followed that NYC's immediate and visible recovery was the most important image to broadcast to the rest of the world, thus proving our resolve as a people.
And so, they sacrificed the health and safety of countless more residents of a city that already bore the brunt of the attacks without their knowledge and certainly without their consent. Local health officials were cautious and did their best to protect their own, but the federal bodies on scene did little to help (IE letting clean up workers elect to don respirators that ought to have been mandatory for the sake of their health).
This flies in the face of the idea that we all came together, that upon reflecting on the events of 9/11 we can all recognize that we are united as citizens. It's just really fucking insulting that the federal government actively suppressed information that would have spared hundreds of city workers from illness because they responded to a crisis that directly affected them, their families, friends, their homes and their psyche's. Meanwhile, those same federal officials guilty of having done so steadfastly maintain that we stay the course, all the while bending 9/11 and the patriotism we happen to feel whenever we reach back and think about it into something that it simply was not and is not. The same is true of our current slew of politicians and pundits.
9/11 is highly politicized, and I know that that's to be expected. But because this is the tenth anniversary I want us to really think about what that politicization means. While you're doing that, here's some reading to help you out.
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