Did you know that September is now Disaster Preparedness Month? I bet you didn't; well, not unless you too were down at Union Square last night and were beseiged with people handing out flyers screaming DO YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO?
Well, do you? And I don't think I mean about the immanent disasters that we're supposed to be looking out for.
Statistically speaking, the world did not become more dangerous on September 12, 2001 than it had been on September 10, 2001. Toss a penny. Whether it comes up heads or tails the first time has no actual bearing on whether it comes up heads or tails the second time.
The world, of course, is not so random, and it can easily be argued that it has radically destabalized since September 11, 2001 (I agree with this), but it's not because terrorism happened that we should suddenly be concerned about it. We should have always been concerned, but concern is not vigilience, good strategy or wisdom, nor are disaster preparedness pamphlets always the best advice to follow -- remember that business with the duct tape and plastic sheeting?
This year is the five year anniversary, and it is, it seems, making us just a little bit stupider. We say, "here's an arbitrary milestone that allows us to consign this to memory, to fictionalize and refictionalize events, to pretend it happened to other people, or, at least, people we're willing to be only once a year."
Of course, the evolution of memory is both how we protect the self and develop cultural myth -- and neither, in concept nor purpose, is inherently objectionable.
But I look at the political landscape and I see anger and yet still this huge overwhelming sense of futility; I see our values in question and misrepresented on all sides; I see my city's hubris and shame and absent joy and people struggling with the fact that they love this place, struggling with the fact that it both is and isn't different than the rest of America, struggling with the fact that September is the beginning of school and birthdays and weddings and death and wearing a jacket for walking your dog in the park. Ordinary things. Ordinary days.
I think, more than anything, native New Yorkers have a real dislike of being part of a symbol. This predates 9/11. The idea that we're your stardom fantasy, your wealthy day-dream, your sexy poverty I've-seen-Rent-too-many-times struggle and hope. It's uncomfortable. It misses the mark. It's also so true and real for people from other places, and sometimes, even for us. How can we live up to that when we're struggling against our city and for our city -- and now there's this? This idea that all this rhetoric is somehow on our behalf, in our memory.
My city is not a poster child. Mourners are not symbols. My home is not fictive.
Except, maybe it is. Maybe that's what we learnt after 9/11. I remember two things:
1. A story in the New York Times early after it happened and the papers could be found again (it took a few days) interviewing people around America about what they thought of NYC. "I always thought New York was a den of sin," one fellow said, "but now I see they love each other like everyone else."
2. A few months later, sitting in the dark of the movie theatre the night Lord of the Rings was released and I started shaking and crying when the stairs collapsed in the Mines of Moria because of the pause, the teeter, the moment of suspension like a dancer or a basketball player, before it came down; it looked familiar.
Of course, I believe in the full lives of fictional people. Maybe that's why I manage okay in the new New York. But watching this struggle we seem to have, to cross back over an invisible border that maybe we were never on the other side of in the first place, hurts.
This post brought to you by
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zarq's blogging about "The Path to 9/11" here:
http://zarq.livejournal.com/514946.html and my belief that somehow we have to start talking about the path after or the road back.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
