Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett Rev History Rev .00 - 05/08/2013 Rev .01 - 03/09/2022
September 11th…
I received no precognition of 9/11. No dreams of planes or buildings or new york or 343 firefighters losing their lives to pull just one more person from a teeter-totter hours–then minutes–then seconds away from tumbling to earth.
Why?
Were the 2996 people who died as a result of 19 men on a mission from their God not a great enough tragedy for my God to consider noteworthy?
Was my God preoccupied with the 30,273 children who died of starvation that day, the 30,273 children who died the day before, and the 30,273 children who would die the next?
I don’t know.
What I do know now is that my lack of foresight then made the event unbelievable in the moment of it’s happening.
Jimmy yelling through the door,
“Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade towers”
KC and I barely heard
lost in lust and laughter
continuing to play balls deep
for the rest of the morning-turned-afternoon.
For whatever the reason of non-prophecy, The crushed blue velvet walls of the makeout-room formed a Chrysalis sheltering KC and I in our playful delights, away from a world stopped in fear.
We emerged later that day red faced, sweaty and ready for an early evening breakfast. The roommates were unusually absent for a Tuesday evening, so we headed to campus to see if there was an art opening or catering event that had drawn everyone away to a free meal. Kirksville, MO was a ghost town. The streets were empty of traffic and had we been paying attention to anything but each other, we might have noticed that there were no students out walking around to their late classes either. It was not until we walked into the Student Union that the gravity of that day caught up and pulled us back to earth.
Hundreds of people–students, professors, janitors, cafeteria workers, and us–stood watching the news pour out of the television. Buildings had crumbled into the earth. Terrorists had hijacked the airways. Flames of anger and fear were igniting across the United States, while for the briefest of moments, the entire world shed tears for the loss of lives in New York, DC and Pennsylvania.
For that moment there was an opportunity for this nation to show the world how a responsible entity can suffer hurt. We could have let our healing be an open process of accepting weakness and letting others help us come to terms with our feelings of loss and anger. We could have demonstrated how a nation could acknowledge this horrible tragedy, and use it to grow, to step forward and remove the false walls and boundaries that separate us from other nations. 9/11 could have been a moment the US began seeing itself as a part of an empathic and supportive global community.
But the men capable of taking that step, had no intention to face loss like real, vulnerable human beings. It was their intention from ground zero to turn the hurt around and reflect it back upon this planet–to use hurt as a weapon against “enemies” real and imagined that would allow them to perform a wild power grab in the name of reasserting “the strength of the United States of America.” They did this with very close to the full consent of the people of this nation. We were a people who allowed the lies of fear and hate to transform a moment ripe for the promise of rebirth into a trail of unending violence and death.
My God did not show me in prophecy the overwhelming world tragedy that 9/11 would come to represent. The immediate event, and its fallout caught me by surprise and would put our revolutionary struggle its back foot.
Although we would neither understand it or acknowledge it for years to come, our movement was set on a course of backpedaling away from victories won in cities like Seattle and Cincinnati. We would still fight and try–we are still fighting and trying–to turn the tide, and some times small victories would still be achieved. But the shadow of doubt was cast on that day that would haunt our movement like ghosts for years to come, and me personally forever.
I had been betrayed by the source of my power to take action when it still could have mattered. Our tactics grew more desperate with each fresh wave of repression against us–justified in the name of national security. We went from being labeled protesters, to radicals to extremists to terrorists. Labels wich would succeed in separating us from those we claimed to be struggling for, as well as starting to separate us from each other–and ourselves.