Columnists
From away
By the time this paper hits the stands the whole world will be harkening back to the morning of September 11, 2001. Most of us have a picture in our head about what happened that day. The amateur videos of the passenger planes hitting those buildings. On that morning, as New York City was was crumbling, I was at work with my colleagues. The three of us were hellbent to wrap up the season at the County Museums, and put paid to a year fraught with understaffing issues, relentless badgering and harassment by one selfproclaimed chair-of-theboard, budget issues and pressure from “the boss” to make the County’s heritage sites profitable. By mid-afternoon I was at home, on my couch, wondering what the H E double hockey sticks had happened. I’d had a brief meeting with my two co-workers to let them know about my big “boo-hoo”, that I’d had enough of the stress and might have referred to someone as a “pompous buffoon”. By mid-afternoon I was out of a job, at home, blathering on the phone to a friend about my woes. My friend, an OMA advisor, interrupted my fuming and fussing. She more or less told me to stop whining and turn the television on. Apparently, the world had bigger fish than mine to fry. And so it was on September 11, 2001. In less than an hour I realized how truly insignificant my insult and injury really were compared to the people affected by the hijackings, and subsequent crashes, of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93.
On September 11, eighteen years later, we still don’t know the true story of what happened in New York City that morning. Like many of you, I’ve read lots of news stories, I’ve listened and watched the broadcast pundits with their best guesses and have wavered back and forth between this assumption and that notion. Most days I lean toward a conspiracy by politicians to garner the limelight and focus the world on their power to make it all better. And, I am still mesmerized by the videos and the first person accounts of the terrorist attack on the US of A. My heart still lurches when I am reminded of the day when so many unsuspecting people, everyday people, were tossed a curve ball. Sometimes I think of all of the times I made my way to “the office” but when all was said and done I went home at the end of my day, safe and sound. On September 11, 2001, I went home a little bit earlier than usual, but I made it home in one piece. While I was muddling through my so-calledlife, hundreds of people were dead or dying or trying to make it out alive. Four crashes, 2,996 fatalities, 6,000 people injured and thousands of people, to this day, living and coping with the aftereffects of that morning.
Those attacks changed the world. From that day forward, getting from here-to-there, wherever a border had to be crossed, is no longer as simple as presenting a visa or a passport. From that day forward, every traveller is a suspect, especially if the traveller didn’t look like “us” or sound like “us”—whatever “us” looks and sounds like. While we didn’t have a border-free world before 9/11, we were less impeded in our travels. In those moments, the idea of welcoming strangers with open arms vanished, almost completely. We are quick to blame outsiders for terrorism, but are blind to the number of domestically spawned terrorist attacks that have happened since 9/11. As we approach October 21st, we must tell our candidates to stop the trash talk about immigrants and refugees. Remind them we are all from another place. “We all came from away”.
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