Truth Thursday
As we waited for Hurricane Irene, hyped as the storm of the century, to descend on the East Coast of the US, I started thinking about the panic I have felt with every natural disaster that has befallen us over the past 10 years. Hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes – these have all hit my region of the country. We have suffered power outages that have lasted days, and we have friends whose houses have been destroyed by downed trees.
All of this has unnerved me more than I could ever have imagined.
I think that my shattered nerves are a combination of being a parent and having lived through 9/11 in DC.
Twelve years ago, when my daughter was an infant, we were vacationing on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with close friends. A hurricane was homing in on us, and strangely, every community on the Banks was evacuated except ours.
I was a mess, glued to the Weather Channel. Just 16 months earlier, we had lost our infant son, and my new baby daughter was the blessing of life I needed to move on. I was almost irrationally terrified for her safety. And so, despite the gentle teasing of the friends we were with, we packed everything up and made our way to safer land until the storm passed by.
Ever since that day, I have been a basket case around weather events. I feel them in my bones, and am unhinged by the idea that my family might be in harm’s way.
And then, 10 years ago, 9/11 struck fear into my house and my heart like nothing I had ever experienced.
At that point, I had a 6 year-old, a 2 year-old and a three-week–old infant in my arms. I spent day after day in the days that followed the attack at the playground, pushing my daughter in the swings, the bright blue skies and sunshine belying the strange calm that stoked our skies and the terror that lived in my mouth like metal.
In the coming months, our region would be struck by random anthrax attacks, the deadly insanity of the sniper, and even the crazy man with the tractor in the reflecting pool on the Mall. Nothing felt safe. Nothing felt normal. We would have dinner with friends and everyone would ponder the question of whether we would even stay – perhaps it made more sense to move someplace less of a target. Our house is six miles from the White House - a stone’s throw from the heart of a potential catastrophe.
As a recent Washington Post article noted, for the past 10 years, everyday in Washington has been September 12th. No one has ever really felt safe again. Every day, we send our children off to school and activities, and yes, we laugh, and we play, and we carouse on the soccer sidelines. We have parties, we have celebrations, we take vacations.
But if there is a helicopter droning low in the sky, every single one of us who lived here during that terrible time will look up in panic. If a transformer explodes during a thunder storm, we look at each other knowingly, for a split second, wondering if it is an attack, or simply notification that our power is out (again.)
Last summer I visited my cousin in the beautiful foothills of Santa Barbara. As we drove up the mountain to her house, I could hear the whir of a helicopter hanging low in the sky. She noted that it was their emergency copter and that it alerts everyone to imminent danger. For Californians, that danger is brush fires – scary enough in and of themselves, I will admit. But for Washingtonians, the sound strikes a fear of terror of a different sort.
The day Barack Obama was elected, I felt the hope of our nation, and was elated in a way that no political event had ever before made me feel. Perhaps our world would become a safer place, one that I wouldn’t be nervous about leaving to my children.
But three years later, I realize that the hope I felt was fleeting, and that even a politician like Obama, whose political mantra matched my own, was not powerful enough to catapult our country and our world into a new order of peace and stability.
In four days, we will mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The names of the heroes and the dead will be read aloud. The new complex rising up in lower Manhattan will be dedicated. There will be ceremonies at the Pentagon and on a field of wild flowers in rural Pennsylvania. Retelling my children the story of the heroes of Flight 93 makes me cry.
For despite the heroes, my children will always live in a post-9/11 world. There will always be the threat of terrorism on our shores, and in our daily lives. They will always have their bags checked, their shoes removed at the airport, and the possibility that their lives will be upended by a major terrorist attack. They will also always live in a world subject to enormous environmental disaster – a new world order, brought on by man himself.
Would I have brought them into this world had I known what was to come?
And then I hear their voices, playing together, living together, growing up together in our house. And I understand that mothers have been having children throughout history, despite the downfall of civilizations, despite the atrocities of war and genocide, despite famine, despite natural disasters. Despite terror and fear.
We bring these children to life in order to sustain our own lives. In order to leave our mark on the world. We bring them forth with the great hope that perhaps they will be able to change things so that this earth, this world, this civilization is a better and safer place than before they were here.
On the Friday night Shabbat before we mark the 9/11 anniversary, I will whisper to each of my children a special 21st century prayer for their lives – for safe passage, for solidarity with others and for love of friends and family to see them through. For the possibility of a life free from the fears we live with today.
Then I will kiss each of them on top of their heads and intone the ancient Hebrew blessing for children that we offer each week – “May God bless you and keep you, may God’s face shine upon you and be gracious unto you, may God lift his face toward you and give you peace.”
Amen.
photo by Joelk75 via Flickr
Thank you, Karen. This is beautifully written and quite a moving testimony.
Posted by: Luther Jett | Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 11:19 AM