The Parasitic Meme

I hadn’t intended to make any kind of commentary about the September 11, 2001 attacks. I hadn’t planned to explicitly remember or commemorate 9/11 in any way. I don’t doubt my fellow citizens’ need to do so, or the proper level of news coverage and analysis that journalists are doing this week. All those people are like me and not like me in different ways, and I recognize the need for that.

But Russell Fox’s comments on the event at its 10th anniversary got me thoughtful (thanks for that, Russell!) and in the mood to jot some things down.

At the time, it seemed to me that we would end up going to war. We did; it followed from simple logic that enough Americans would want revenge and all of us would want prevention. I remember the online discussions I participated in. Some were angry enough to call for bin Laden’s entire culture to be destroyed in nuclear fire.

I remember thinking that, once the smoke cleared and the count was taken, 3000 out of three hundred million was not a large number. I thought at the time that that many people died each day in the U.S. without anyone taking notice or moving to prevent their loss with armies or billions of dollars. I thought all those things.

Today I checked the numbers again, and I’m wrong. It was, in fact, a big deal. 3000 dead in a morning is two orders of magnitude larger than the number of American traffic deaths in a day. It’s half that of an average day of deaths by any cause in my country. It should have caused the mourning it did.

At the time, it seemed to me that we ought to mourn the fact of that certain and future war making and regret the deaths of all the people our soldiers were preparing to kill, even if we were now required to concede its necessity. The only reasons to go to any war, I thought, would have been to get them to leave us alone.

We went beyond that when we went nation-building. I wanted us all to mourn those dead, too, as victims of 9/11. The tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis lost as collateral damage when the U.S. didn’t (couldn’t?) secure the peace there after toppling Saddam. So many others whose minds and bodies drowned in all that rage.

But we didn’t. Far too many of us watched war-making the way we’d watch a football game, cheering our own side and hoping (perhaps praying?) that our enemies would die horribly.

I kept thinking about the Christian edict: Love your enemies; do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you. Doubtless the al Qaeda operatives involved, from Mohammed Atta to Osama bin Laden, did both those things.

It was a dissonant mentation: How do you love an enemy whose hatred for you is idealistic and complete? That the only choice he permits is which will instantly die? How do you love him, if his intent is surprise, with the fact that he gives no time to decide? If his picture of you is so false, so self-serving, so perfectly evil, that there is nothing you can do to change it?

The thing I wanted out of my leaders was to appear on the world stage to do nothing. No flashy invasions, no public recrimination. Heightened security at airports and a marvelous public relations campaign teaching us all how to spot monsters like that, and where to report what we saw.

I wanted them to answer malice with military silence, and in that silence, to do the quiet, difficult, thankless police and diplomatic work that would get them to relax their own fieldcraft a bit and start being sloppy. And then, quietly, simply, take them out and throw the news of it out with Friday afternoon White House press announcements. Any more than that, I thought at the time, gave them too much credit.

Instead, we got two flashy wars; not every American is like me. But, we also got the hard police work and the results of determination against an enemy. Osama bin Laden is dead today. Our enemies are routed and though still organized, they’re back to the scale of car bomb surprises, plans which they haven’t been able to complete on our soil since then.

God willing, they won’t ever succeed again.

On September 11, 2002, in a personal bid to overcome the terror in my own heart about airplanes, I took a flying lesson in a Piper Cub. I carried an American flag in the Cub to commemorate the day. The flag sits on a shelf in my office now. I would go on to earn a full private pilot certificate a few months later. Planes don’t scare me any longer. The flag is on my shelf in my office. The terror is gone.

And tomorrow, on September 11, 2011, on the 10th anniversary but certainly not for it, I will board a Boeing 737 from Portland, OR to Anaheim, CA, for a work-related trip. When making the flights I gave no thought to the date.

That alone is commemoration. That means to me that we Americans won. We’re more vigilant today, but business is possible as usual.

And when the replacement tower is complete and there’s a restaurant at the top, I will go to New York City and sit down there to make a final contribution and remembrance: I will pay a New Yorker for waiting table, a service freely offered and gratefully received, in trade currency we both honor, in the most banal and unnoticeable way possible, having used commercial airplanes to get there and back in simple and thoughtless obviation of terrorist enmity.

The Forest Ridge

I grew up in a relatively normal American middle-middle class neighborhood, a street called “Ferngrove”, which actually had ferns in its generally well-manicured yards.

The developers of the neighborhood also left as many 80-year-old Douglas Fir trees as they could leave, when the houses were built. So it was also a grove. The neighboring streets had names with equal integrity: “Woodridge”, “Pinecreek”, “Knollcrest”.

To the west of the neighborhood, about 200 feet from my house, the forest thickened and the land there was undeveloped. The neighborhood was surrounded by those stands of firs.

There were trails worn through the trees where I and kids like me would ride our bikes, completely unsupervised. We could bike as far away as two miles through the largest of those thickened forest areas. There were some areas for stunt-BMX biking and a couple of tree houses. The boys of the neighborhood would retreat to those places to do what 80′s preteen boys always did when they have no supervision. It was safe to have no supervision. It was our forest and playground. It was the boxed-in forest ridge.

In front of my house, the view to the west from the street at evening put the sun through the firs. When there was no rain or fog, the needles of the fir tress scattered the sunlight. We never saw the full sunrise or sunset from our house. In autumn and spring, the wind blew the trees slowly back and forth. It enlivened the light, and cast the street in fractal moving shadow, and I was protected from the abrupt beginning or final end of any day by my guardian firs.

I lived in that box of scattered living light, biking and breathing through the firs. I amused myself with minor mischiefs and as many science fiction books as I could find. I grew up on the forest ridge, never realizing that’s what it was, or how small it was, as ignorant of the mortality of those constant evergreens as I was of my own.

I would watch the sunset through those trees. After Mount St. Helens began erupting, on the days when the winds were from the North, the colors were breathtaking. I watched the light without context or wisdom, mesmerized in my ignorance.

I have that memory today. There’s no way to reproduce it; the ungroomed trails and wild lands have been cut down since 1990, replaced with a thousand manicured homes, a park, and far fewer and much younger trees. The sunset shadow play is muted. The mountain is quiet again.

My children will never see it. They’ve never ridden bikes on trails through two-mile thickets of firs. I can’t give them what my favorite city has taken away.

I retain my years there in thought, and the sunsets through the trees on the forest ridge, grateful to have grown under the watch of silent guardians, glad to have this place of safety in my youth.