Reflecting on 9/11 and the last 20 years
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Dawn Davidson
Date: Tue, Sep 14, 2021 at 2:54 PM
Subject: Re: Reflecting back on 20 years ago
Thanks, [G], for your poignant remembrances of that day, 9/11/2001. Your connection to the suffering of the people in the Twin Towers was so direct. I imagine it still haunts you. I share your feelings about the soul of our country being damaged that day, possibly irrevocably.
My experiences of the event were more personal and less far-reaching. We - my now-ex-husband Akien and I - had friends working in the Pentagon at the time, so we were personally very concerned about the plane headed that way. Our friend Chris wasn't at the building at the time, fortunately. If he had been, several things might have been very different for us, and for our daughter Victoria Collins (now Vickery), who went to live with them for a while, a year or two later.
We were hosting our Poly Pool Parties at the time, and we had one scheduled for the weekend immediately following the event. We debated cancelling it, but decided to go ahead. We were glad we did, since it turned out that several of our attendees still had strong ties to NYC, and were in great need of community. It was a somber event, as people talked over their fears for their loved ones while holding each other close. At least one of those loved ones was eventually found to have perished in the Tower collapse. .
The thing that hit me the hardest, though, was that in a wild coincidence our cat Mitha - who used to sleep on me at night until I had become pregnant and had to end that in 1996 - had been killed by a pack of wild dogs during the night before. I remember the resonating grief, from the personal to the national and back again. Wild dogs locally, and wild dogs worldwide, was how it felt. By turns I felt like my personal grief was so small and insignificant by comparison so I almost had no right to it, and that, conversely, the whole world grieved with me.
How much more I might have grieved if I'd had realized that the "wild dogs" would soon be proven to be our own country.
For 2 or 3 years after 9/11/01, I participated in a meaningful ritual on the anniversary of the attacks. There was a "Rolling Requiem," wherein groups of singers in every time zone sang Mozart's Requiem, starting every hour on the hour. Because the piece is slightly longer than an hour, this meant that for 24 hours straight, somewhere in the world the Requiem was being sung. It was an interesting and meaningful experience to be a part of this effort to heal the world through music, connected through time and space to singers worldwide.
When we started the Rolling Requiems, we thought surely things would change, and would soon go back to "normal." That the onerous - and in many ways ridiculously useless - searching procedures before plane flights would be lifted; the governmental communications snooping would be a thing of the past; the border controls would loosen. Of course they have not. Even "the good guys" haven't been very good. Though at least I no longer (at least not for the next 3 years?) live in daily fear of the madman with his finger on the red button.
No, now - here in Memphis TN where I am helping to take care of our aging, Trump-voting parents, and where even the staff of the assisted living facility might or might not be vaccinated, and regularly fail to wear their masks properly if at all - here I live in fear that some unvaccinated a-hole will unknowingly pass the Delta variant to me, or my parents, or Jen, and all the care and sacrifices of the past 18 months will be made moot because our government thinks it's ok to (non-consensually) take our money to spend on bombs and fighter planes, but doesn't think it's ok to "force" its citizens to vaccinate and mask in order to end the pandemic.
What a screwed up country - in a screwed up world - we all live in.
Thank you for your memories, [G]. I will see if Jen or I can find and play those tracks you mentioned. And I look forward --with perhaps unwarranted hope - to the time that you and I and all of us in the RS - can once more be fully, physically, joyfully, One In The Dance.
Dawn