9/11/2021: What's Different?

 I’ve been thinking a lot about what I wanted to say today, 20 years on from the worst terrorist attack on our nation, a year during the worst pandemic in our nation’s history. Should I connect them? Is it worth saying, if it's probably been said already, with interest?

The one commonality in all of it is that indifference is the cause of all of it. Indifference to those who are left suffering the consequences.

20 years ago, we were united in our grief, and for that time, we were all Americans. Why, 20 years later, in the face of another situation resulting in thousands upon thousands of deaths, do we hate each other so much?

At this stage, it’s impossible to ask for that type of unification. Instead of sharing the tragedy as we did, acknowledging it as an attack on all of us, we keep fighting amongst ourselves, treating each other as enemies.

The tragedy of today is that the lesson we learned 20 years ago has been forgotten at best, ignored at worst. In the weeks, months following September 11, 2001, we looked past our differences and saw each other for who we were. Now we use our differences to mark each other as enemies.

It was, it has to be said, the same attitude that formed the basis of the attacks that day. It was figures who hated our country, our people, and wanted to strike a singularly devastating blow against us. They didn’t care who died, the party they aligned with, what they looked like – as long as they were dead in the end.

How do we get past this type of division when we did so successfully once before? To be honest, I don’t know if it’s possible. So much of the division of today was founded on the tragedy 20 years ago. Too many people were told if they aligned with a certain viewpoint, they were the only ones who really cared about what happened, and anyone else who didn't align weren't true “Americans,” to be derided, opposed and treated with the same contempt as those who launched the attacks that day.

The massive, climbing death toll from COVID-19 hasn’t brought the unification we had in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11, 2001. It has to be said, many times that number of people have died since the pandemic began. Nearly that many die each day. But there is an apathy by so many to all of it, and the potential of those who stand to get it and, as many have, will die of it.

I don’t write this hoping to make a major impact. In fact, I know it won’t. But I have to ask: is it really worth it hating each other when we live on the same land and under the same flag, when we’ve shown we can do better in the past?

We need to remember that regardless of who we vote for, we believe in the United States of America, not a singular person whose ideals seem “American.”