We Felt Our Mortality

 

We are a young country, the US, in some ways, and ride on the idea of our strength and sense of purpose as a leader among nations. The first country among equals (except we're not) as one might say "primus inter pares." The memorial logos, the sigils, the swag, often just show the World Trade Towers themselves, draped in flag-wrap. The buildings were not the tragedy--the loss of lives was.  We lost great people that day. We lost parents and children, leaders and caregivers, sinners and saints. All kinds of people. Office workers, police, firefighters, medics. 

But the pictures of the victims themselves is too haunting: and yet we see them, forever in our minds. And they get reposted on social media. 

We are losing them even today--people who inhaled too much of whatever makes buildings and are dying too young of what they breathed in. We are losing them even now, people who were there or their loved one was there and now it's 22 years out, and we lose people all the time. The narrative memory of what happened will fade. Except in what has been committed to print, video, etc.--but that memory is always a little short. 

Tragedies amortize. Tragedies fade. We said "Never again" but we don't step into the same river twice, or face the same sort of history as Memorex: just an echo. 

Osama Bin Laden is gone a dozen years. George W. Bush has been out of office more than 14 years ago. The Iraq War was ended in 2011. The war in Afghanistan ended two years ago. Violence in the world endures. The United States endures. And terrorism, whether foreign or domestic, is a real threat. Extremists attacked an embassy in 2012, and it got politicized. Because 9/11 was already politicized. The human tragedy was years ago made a political football. It was because of an "axis of evil". It was because they hate us for our freedoms: except also Falwell and Robertson went that far--they hated us for our freedoms, too. 

Falwell and Robertson's heirs and assigns still hate us for our freedoms. I feel my mortality too much to give up my freedom for anything, because I'm fixing to die anyway--we all do. In the face of terrorism (especially of the domestic sort, which is all the right wing anymore) I will far rather die a death for freedom than be safe. I am queer, militantly agnostic, and woke as I can be. I don't fear Al-Qaeda--and I don't fear MAGA.

But I'd far rather live. I feel my mortality and our nation's mortality. In the spirit of 9/11, I spit at MAGA and the people who would stunt democracy, defile our history, bleed us white to deny our melting pot heritage. We have threats from outside our borders--but the threat within is more dangerous. Because it is more persistent and present.

In the name of the fallen of 9/11, our gay saint, our mixed martyrs, I embrace the feeling of mortality to want to live more freely and more apostate--to be the advocate the adversaries we create require. More aware of what is outside our borders. More sure that borders also are a fabrication that obscures our reckoning with one another. 

We will move beyond the romanticizing of the tragedy to actually fully mourn what we lost--but only if we acknowledge the humanity of it. It is not about symbols or politicization.  We intensely responded because we all mourned, we just all mourn in different ways, and find different ways to deal with the loss. But the US is still here, and our flag is still there, and for that much, let us be thankful.