I distinctly remember the morning of September 11th in 2001 in contrast to September 10th, 2001, which is a complete mystery. It had to be about 10 am in Bloomington, Indiana when I woke up that morning. I was late for class – too late to do anything about it, so I decided to grab an early lunch with my girlfriend, Katie (who's now my wife). I did not own a television while in college thus, my only source of information was the computer, which for whatever reason I did not turn on that sunny, cool morning. I did not encounter many people on my way to the little Chinese restaurant I used to purchase a bowl of fried rice for lunch (less than a buck, filling and delicious!), which I guess I thought nothing of at the time, but the restaurant was quite packed and very loud. I saw Katie, who looked upset.
"What's wrong?" Or something of the nature came out of my mouth.
"Didn't you hear? The World Trade Center was knocked over..."
The sentence sounded preposterous. You can't knock over the World Trade Center... but she repeated it... and I remembered the WTC bombing... Who was that carried out by? I asked her if they knew who did it. She said no. But in my head I just kept repeating "Fuck you Osuma Ben Ladeen."
That was before I became more familiar with the "correct" spelling of his name. A name I have never forgotten. I scrawled "Fuck you Osuma Ben Ladeen. You deserve to die." in chalk on the outside of one of the limestone buildings on campus a few hours later. I don't recall what I did between then and lunch. I had tears welling in my eyes... Usually profanity scribbled on the building is cleaned, but this remained on the wall for days. Clearly others shared my sentiment. Indeed, two days later, I respelled his name on the wall... and it remained up there for a while later. Bloomington, IN, a town very much in the same vein as Ann Arbor or Madison, a mid-west ultra-liberal college town, was quite fine with this.
And every year since, we seem to be inundated with the same reminder. I'm forced to recall my steps that day, a day everyone around me became emotionally numb, to the point that it changed the ethos of everyone, not just the people who clean shit off of Indiana University buildings, but everyone. A town so tolerant of everything suddenly felt blood lust. I felt rage. Everyone felt something horrible. It would take a long time before Bloomington felt like a small liberal town again
I can't forget, you know. None of us can. Why do we need to be reminded of something we can't forget? Is it to teach our children? As if they're not going to get to experience man's inhumanity to man on this order of magnitude again? Like the horrors Americans endured in WWII? Like the horrors Americans endured in Vietnam? Is it really too much and too politically costly to say...
"This is something horrible... I will never forget it. I just don't want to be reminded of it every year. And it isn't like this "remembrance" brings us together. Do we really need to fight about having members of the religious community come to the site of a massacre done in the name of religion? I don't get these people that celebrate the macabre by playing the towers exploding again and again and again on television. Who in God's name gets off on that? Are there still people that haven't been enraged by it enough? They want to us to see it every year to remind us what it feels like?"
Every year I've silently said to myself "Just leave me the fuck alone, please...for God's sake, leave me alone." This year... I'm going to say it out loud.