Something troubled me yesterday. I went to bed strangely quiet, in the wee hours of the morning, and for a long while I stared straight up at the dark ceiling of my apartment with wide open eyes. In fact, I was dumbfounded: I had just heard somebody die.
On September 11, 2001, on Floor 105 of No. 2 World Trade Center, in New York City, there was a man named Kevin Cosgrove. He was trapped in an office with two other people, trapped by a raging fire and suffocating black smoke. But it wasn’t the fire that killed him. He had called 911, and had remained on the line with an emergency dispatcher until about one second
after the tower began to collapse. His last known words were “Oh God! Oh—”
The audio transcript is just under five minutes. It was played at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. Some of you don’t know who that is. You probably had better things to pay attention to than politics and the news.
Five minutes. I knew from the beginning that this man would die; it said so in the synopsis of the video. But knowing what would happen only made it harder, not easier, to watch. Mr. Cosgrove yelled. He argued. He sobbed. He said he had just called his wife to tell her he was fine, and was on his way out when the second plane struck the World Trade Center. He said he wasn’t ready to die. Then he died anyway. In the last second, you can hear the tower collapsing all around him.
My heart was pounding at the end. I could feel it in my throat. In my mind's eye I could see every detail. My chair at my desk felt too constraining, so I stood up and stretched out.
It troubled me to hear that man die. It was already almost five o’clock in the morning, so I put on the Prelude from
Final Fantasy IX, brushed my teeth and had a glass of water, and then turned it all off and went to bed—where I lay on my back, staring at something that wasn’t my ceiling after all.
All of us have seen the video of the airplane collisions and the towers collapsing. Some of you have probably imagined, like I did, all the people who died in the instant the planes struck the buildings—the ones in the airplanes who were incinerated, and the ones in the offices who were blown apart in the same instant. Perhaps some of them near the windows had one or two seconds of explosive terror.
Then there were all the people who died less quickly, surviving the initial impact but not living long enough for the towers to collapse. Some died of massive trauma, maybe a few by heart attack, many by fire, and others from jumping out of one of the tallest buildings on Earth, without a parachute.
Finally, there were those who held on until the end…until their whole world shattered around them, and took them with it. In that moment when Kevin Cosgrove’s line went dead, dozens of other people died with him, and hundreds more in the seconds that followed. Maybe a few survived the actual collapse long enough to die in agony. Probably not.
Those people were all murdered.
Unlike many of you who enjoy first-person shooters and give no second thought to murder on television and in the movies, I find it hard to lose myself in that stuff. It makes me think of the waste, the tragedy, the terror, the fear, the loss…and the real thing.
As for the real thing, I have a hard time with it. I listened to Kevin Cosgrove die. Last year I watched a security video of a gang mob drag a terrified woman out of a car and beat her to death—on eBaum’s world, no less. I watched terrorists behead Nicholas Berg. I saw them holding his head at the end. I watched people die in Katrina, floating in the cess, and I saw the beaches clogged with dead bodies after the tsunami of 2004. Not least, I have seen pictures of a few of the hundred thousand people who have died in Iraq since we liberated that country in 2003. I posted one of those pictures in a topic here the other day. My point was proven; nobody remarked on how gruesome that was, other than one person to say that, no Josh, it wasn’t all that gruesome.
Some of you who are not American have made the point that September 11 is exaggerated; that the death and destruction does not jive with the huge impact it had on the American psyche. That’s actually a quite remarkably astute point—except exactly backwards. Americans didn’t care about September 11 too much. Everybody cares about most everything else too little.
President Bush said that September 11 changed everything. I doubt that. It changed the United States into a militaristic nation, but that was Bush’s doing. Terrorism was merely a good excuse, in the right place at the right time. I think the only thing September 11 really changed was, for a brief hour, American people’s awareness of death, destruction, and the two of those paired together: the slaughter of life. It was as though the entire world shook—nothing is forever, anything can be destroyed, nobody is safe, everything changes, simplicity is a lie, certainty is a delusion—and then calmed down again. September 11 gave the American people a small taste of the terrific power of
reality.
The people fell back asleep soon enough—as well I expected. I have no delusions about how far away from enlightenment most people are. That the Republicans established one-party rule thereafter was just rubbing it in.
The human psyche, when uninhibited by critical thought or circumstantial duress, is a remarkably simplistic entity. Having just witnessed the most destructive terrorist attack in American history, we wanted more bloodshed. Lots more. Nukes, guns, knives, bare hands…whatever. Kill anyone who even remotely looks like a terrorist, a Muslim, or an Arab. Vengeance, almost the simplest emotion there is. Your heinous deed was unspeakable, but my heinous deed in response will be glorious. It was a perfectly awful start to the 21st century.
But what is even worse is that vengeance, fear, hatred, bullying, and prejudice were the only lasting lessons that most Americans took from our brush with doom. And, with a little help from our uncannily representative government, we proceeded to respond to September 11 in the worst possible way. We took vengeance on people who had done nothing to us. We are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths—dozens of September 11ths all over again. Elsewhere across the globe we browbeat our allies into submission, earning an enmity that will not soon fade. In our enemies’ castles, we inspired a whole new generation of terrorists, some of whom may someday achieve further attacks against us. Back at home, we consented to a dictatorship in the name of security. Civil liberties went on the decline, as did popular support for them. Fascism and policing shot up. Most ironically, we cemented a government who fought and continues to fight a self-declared “war on terror” by making us live in fear.
What should we have done instead?
I’ll tell you what I did. On September 11, 2006, I went to the fair.
I had a good day. The last time I had visited a fair was as a little kid, and it was nowhere near the size of this one. I laughed. I walked. I contemplated the beautiful artwork from school kids across the State of Washington. I marveled at dozens of miracle products in the pavilions. I visited the cows and sheep and the goats. I gawked at pumpkins many times my weight. I slid down the big slide, turned my knuckles white on the roller coasters, closed my eyes on the Ferris wheel ride, gulped down the grease-rich fair food, watched my girlfriend play an accordion, sat in on a horse show, rode the sky cars, spun around, watched glasswork being made, ran my hand across fresh wood sculpture, and found about seventy million Jacuzzis for sale.
I had a good day. I only thought about September 11, 2001, in the furthest recesses of my mind, not counting a few minutes in the morning as I e-mailed my office to excuse myself from work that day.
I am not a pacifist. I think the slaughter of life can be a legitimate tool for a just cause, and not necessarily as only a last resort. Perhaps that’s strange to hear from somebody who was saying just a few paragraphs ago that he isn’t desensitized to murder in movies and games. But it makes sense when you think about it: I simply realize the gravity that slaughter entails.
What we
should have done after September 11—what Captain Picard would have done—is give a speech to the American people and to all the world, reminding us why we aren’t terrorists, why we don’t need to be terrorists, and why we would not become terrorists. We should have brought the massive firepower of our ship of state to bear upon only one enemy: Afghanistan. And we should have made sure the blows were delivered with brutal effect, and sent down an away team to set things right in the aftermath. We should have left that place with a better future ahead…for their people and ours. And then we should have put our phasers to rest, and set about dealing with our grief, and reconstruction.
But Captain Picard and George Dubya Bush do not belong in the same sentence, and the American people are yesterday’s troglodytes rather than tomorrow’s Starfleet officers. Our enemies are less prone to fits of reason and open-mindedness, and our guns have slept not even once in five years.
What I was wondering last night, as I lay in the darkness and stared off into the distance, was whether a murder is any less important because we have no awareness of it, and how wide a gulf there is between people’s complacency and cold reality. If all of the faults and failures of civilization could be packaged into a single metaphor, I would say that the inmates are running the asylum. People simply do not realize the gravity of events or the consequences of their actions. Moreover, they do not
care, either. If Pearl Harbor symbolized our rise as a superpower, September 11 symbolizes our decadence. What comes next depends upon us.
We can begin by voting the Republican Party out of office and demanding some initiative from the Democrats who take over. The GOP is a zombie, controlled by two simultaneous cancers: neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. The Democratic Party, in comparison, can be reasoned with. So it is to them we shall, I hope, take our entreaties this November. Let us hope they show greater wisdom in the majority than they have in the minority.
I mentioned at the beginning that some of you had better things to do than know about Zacarias Moussaoui. That, of course, was a figure of speech, and a veiled insult upon you. It is your apathy, and cynicism, and ignorance, that feeds into the very same political dysfunction you so despise. I tell you this: If the government doesn’t work, it is your fault. In a democracy, the people are king. That means the people are responsible for the conduct of this nation. You want to live in this world the way it is? No? Then, as Celes Chere said, do something about it. I see a great and shining future ahead of us, but we have a long way to go.
So begin where you can. Begin by giving a care. It won’t cost you a cent! Read the news, like ZeaLitY has been doing. You can read it online, up to the minute. Learn more about the world around you. Try to understand things, and think more critically about your assumptions in life. Seek out the enlightenment of the Enterprise. Take in the arts and the sciences that abound on every side of you. And contemplate the slaughter of life by which all our accomplishments are weighed. What you do with this wealth of knowledge…is your choice.
Kevin Cosgrove was sealed into a fate that left him no choice whatsoever. He was murdered by the ignorance, simple-mindedness, and blind faith of two clashing cultures. He didn’t deserve what he got, and neither did his family. His death was horrifying to witness. But I think you should hear it for yourself. Go listen to it, and try to remember that moment when the world shook, and our tallest towers fell.
Except, this time, look for another way out. Your fate remains to be seen.
