Tag: Tragedy

Minneapolis protest

Posted on by KMClantoren

I think everything that needs saying is being said by those whose voices need to be raised. I’ve been active on Twitter, trying to make sure the right information and the right perspectives are passed on. If you want to know where I’m at with the protests, the police violence, and then the fires and looting, find me there.

In the meantime, here’s a link of organizations that currently need support. Minnesota Freedom Fund and Black Visions Collective are both pointing folks who want to donate to these links as they aren’t getting the same level of exposure right now. So if you’re looking for a cause to support in Minnesota today, use these: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLWGTQIe3967hdc9RSxBq5s6KKZHe-3_mWp5oemd7OA/preview?pru=AAABcpTi6i0*9FFWa8rhVq21iWql-vfD-A

Otherwise? The only thing that matters right now is:

#BlackLivesMatter
#BLM
#GeorgeFloyd
#JusticeforGeorge
#DefundthePolice

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March: Into isolation

Posted on by KMClantoren

I am actually typing this a close to a month after the last update, realizing that this month of chaos has been one I entirely missed on the blog. To be fair, the world right now does not look the way it did a month ago.

At the start of the week of March 9th, the spread of COVID-19 was starting to make real ripples in the world.  We weren’t in lockdown then, but that week was when we started to really think about it.  By the end of the week, Sarah and I managed a pretty intensive grocery run, figuring we weren’t going to want to get out to the stores again for a while.  That Saturday, the 14th, we had a gathering with volunteers from CVG.  We were in the same room, but there were fewer hugs, no handshakes, and a palpable difference in people’s body language as we got used to stepping one more pace back from each other.  We didn’t, then, know anyone who was sick.  We figured the world would have to go a little quieter, that people wouldn’t hang out as often — but not that no one would leave their homes.

Sunday the 15th, Sarah and I celebrated Ostara with our Clan.  We had our traditional egg hunt and the giving of chocolate.  It was also a celebration for me, because Friday the 13th had been my last day at the previous job and I was taking a week off before embarking on a new phase in my career.  We played games until 11pm-ish, glad for the big dishes of food and company.  But even then, we were still talking about seeing each other sometimes.  Not often, but sometimes.

Monday the 16th, Sarah changed her mind, the of us to really declare a full lockdown.  She asked me to cancel all hanging with people, and pretty much forbid me from running errands or doing other tasks that might put me into contact with others.  She worries because she knows I’m vulnerable.  We took off in the car to deliver Ostara chocolates to those who hadn’t been able to come, and we spent a little time wandering around Northfield because we were there anyway.  But we felt a little bit like we were the odd ones out.  After all, kids were still going to be in school for a day or two, and the distancing was more voluntary than necessary.

That whole week went by in a blur, partly because we both got hit with absolutely horrific seasonal allergies, and partly because the news in the world was rapidly worsening on every front.  The common areas in the condo closed, cutting off access to our pool and workout room.  Schools in MN shut down, ostensibly for a longer spring break, but the rumblings of something more permanent were present.  By the weekend, March 22nd was supposed to be a ConCom meeting and instead it turned into a series of video calls because everyone who wasn’t “essential” was staying home with almost no exceptions.  Runs for food and basic necessities still happened, but most people had not set foot out of their homes for days, Sarah and I included.

That’s also the point when I started to recognize the effect of isolation on myself and took to ranting on Twitter.  But COVID-19 cases were mounting everywhere, and I was still vulnerable, so I assured Sarah I would not break our quarantine.  We set up calls twice a week with our CVG team just to hang out virtually and keep each other company.

Then I started work at the new company, and the last full week of March vanished into a rush of learning new systems, new names, and trying to do it entirely remotely as the company (and many others) had sent everyone to work from home without exception.  The economy was suffering hard, and all indications were that things were getting worse, not better.  Deaths were piling up, and hospitals were out of PPE.  People were sewing masks out of t-shirts.  Unemployment shot up.  Fox News quit lying about the pandemic.

Sarah and I started trying to do something musical or meditative every other day or so, trying to keep ourselves balanced and positive in a world sliding down an exponential curve to hell.  I wrote a new translation for a cover of “Diamond Crevasse” from Macross Frontier; Sarah is still mixing/balancing the tracks before we put in a visual aspect and post it online.  I started a oneshot on my list from years ago.  I got my first paycheck, but the company also took a hit.  I realized I was going through cycles of not sleeping 3-5 nights, then sleeping well for 2-3 with no appreciation for which nights were in front of workdays instead of weekends.

And now here we are.  March has ended, and April begins with the world fully in the grip of COVID-19.  We haven’t hugged anyone but each other since March 16th.  Haven’t spoken to someone in person other than the security guy in the building when picking up packages or the chiropractor since March 18th.   Haven’t run errands, living 95% off our badass grocery run with 1 instance of delivered food, since March 14th.  We wash our hands between loads of laundry because I have to touch the machines down the hall.  We meet our CVG folks on Tuesdays and Fridays to chat, and the choir has started doing “guided rehearsals” over the internet.

People have said this is like a war, but I think it’s more akin to exactly what it is — a natural disaster.  And so I’ve been reminding myself of the Survival Rule of Three.

You can only go three minutes without oxygen.  Three hours without shelter.  Three days without water.  Three weeks without food.  But you can only go three seconds without hope.  If you lose hope, you’re lost before you’ve begun.

So I’m not always upbeat or positive.  I’m not okay, but nobody’s okay.  How could anyone be?  Most days I can manage my anxiety, push the dread and fear down.  I’m doing much better about controlling my access to social media and the increased stress that comes with reading the latest stats and knowing the current worst case.  Most days I breathe all day long, and I don’t cry.  Most days, I can even find a way to do something that makes me happy, either writing or singing or thinking about cosplay.  Most days, I’m not okay, but I’m surviving.  Most days I’m not breaking the Survival Rule of Three.

I can’t say more than that.  I can’t say it’ll get better, or I’m waiting for it to get worse.  I can’t say that I’ll be able to make it through if I get hit by a bad downswing.  There is no certainty right now.  There is only right now.

And yet, I know I’m one of the lucky ones.  Minnesota acted fast, and comprehensively.  I still have a job, and we can afford to buy the food and prescriptions we need without worrying about bills piling up.  I have a frustrating, hilarious, ever-challenging, ever-entertaining kitten to distract me and cause new problems to solve.  I am in isolation with the person I absolutely adore, the person whose presence never becomes tiresome, the person who makes me laugh no matter what, the person I trust with everything.  We aren’t sick.

And we’re still struggling.

I miss the FUCK out of the people I love.  I miss the FUCK out of hugs.  Out of hanging and watching anime.  Out of being able to cry on a shoulder, or vent, or poke somebody in the ribs.  When I get to life After COVID-19, I am NEVER going to take those moments for granted again.  I didn’t before, having been alone in life already and knowing what that feels like, but even so — it’s different.  A lot is going to be different.  Life BC-19 (Before COVID-19) and AC-19 will be alternate universes of one another.  I’m not sure in AC-19 if I’m ever going to touch anything in public ever again, if I’m ever going to be able to pick up housekeys without wanting to wash my hands before I touch anything else.

But AC-19 feels very far away.  And there’s a very real chance that, when I get there, I won’t be there with everyone who was a part of my life in BC-19.  That all of us will lose someone, maybe many someones.  That all of us will be marked, forever.  That we’ll emerge with new scars is a certainty.  How deep they’ll run, how hard it will be to heal them — only time will tell.

Until then, take care of yourselves, goddamnit.  I want you in the world when this is over.  I want you in the world with me.  Do what you have to, just survive.  Just not from this fucking coronavirus, but from the isolation and the fear and the struggle.  Be selfish if you have to.  Be kind whenever you can.  But just survive.  Hang on.  Be there to hug me someday again.

The rhythm of my footsteps crossing flatlands to your
Door have been silenced forevermore
And the distance is quite simply much to far for me to row;
It seems farther than ever before

I need you so much closer

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Seasons of Love

Posted on by KMClantoren

Since “RENT Live” aired over the weekend, this seems like a good time to tackle this song. Before I go into my own side of it, I want to make sure I acknowledge some of RENT’s major failings, specifically around intersectionality. RENT is a cornerstone for LGBT representation in media, but it has some big, big blind spots where it comes to race. As I saw @mollybackes put it on Twitter, “RENT treats Joanne and Benny as white people who happen to be black, and so disparages them for committing the ultimate sin of selling out without ever considering the fact that selling out might mean something different to POC tan to rich white kids from Connecticut.” I am not qualified to further break down the point, but it is valid and worth reading up about; check out @mollybackes thread on Twitter for more.

That said, there is a lot of positive in RENT. It doesn’t do enough, but it still does good. And if you can watch all the way through it and not come out crying, then you need your emotion circuits checked. It’s a powerful, human story, and what it does to lift up the LGBT community cannot be overstated.

But the first time I ever heard of it, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was “Seasons of Love.”

If you happened to be in any choir in the late 1990’s, you probably know the song. I sang it every year in high school, and at least once in middle school. It became the anthem for “what do we put in our final concert of the year to sum up the end of school?” And, taken out of context, it’s a sweet song about using love as the benchmark by which you grow, by which you mark time. Taken out of context, time and love exist as comfy platitudes.

Put it back in context.

I’m not talking about the context of RENT. I’m talking about the context of the wider LGBT community.

RENT first showed up in a workshop production in 1993, ending up on Broadway in 1996. 1995 was also the peak year of deaths of HIV/AIDS according to the CDC. To a middle schooler, or to a person looking back more than 20 years, it’s easy to forget that RENT was telling a very, very prescient story at its time. And while the focus may have been on love, that love was inextricably interwoven with grief.

I wasn’t there, but I have heard the stories.

People kept books of names — their friends, their neighbors, the people they saw in and out of daily life — so they could track which were alive and which were dead as the AIDS epidemic swept through the LGBT community. People were attending funerals several times a week, sometimes, for those who got funerals. So many died and had no service, either because family wasn’t willing to have an open ceremony for a victim of AIDS or because funeral services wouldn’t handle AIDS-positive bodies. Women in the community, particularly the lesbians who were less impacted by the epidemic, found themselves as the only support network left after a man’s friends and partners were all dead; some dedicated themselves to bedside vigils because there was no one left.

Think about that. Just think about it. Imagine if something was killing all the members of your community. You’re already marginalized, already stigmatized, already on the edge of constant disdain and violence and mockery. You hold tight to those who are like you, because that is all you have; sometimes even family and old friends have turned their back. And now you are dying, one by one, horribly.

And no one cares.

The government blames you. “It’s being part of this group,” they say. “Be something else, something not so different, and you’ll be safe.” The pundits scream that “THIS IS WHAT YOU DESERVE” for being deviant. The doctors don’t care because you are an expensive burden with no hope. Society as a whole gives a big shrug and figures, “well, at least it’s happening to people no one will miss.”

And still your friends are dying.

Eventually, but far, far, far too late, people wake up and realize that this isn’t just happening to weed out the undesirables — this is happening to PEOPLE. HUMAN BEINGS are dying and suffering and there is no explanation. Eventually money is allocated, political resources bring pressure to bear, advancements are made. But the damage is done. According to the CDC data, more than a quarter of a million people in the US died because of AIDS just in the years between 1987 and 1995. That’s 28,347 a year. 78 people every single day in the US alone.

Honestly, I cannot imagine it. I cannot imagine the pain, the helplessness, the fear, the grief. The sheer magnitude of the crisis. This now-famous picture is of San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus was taken by Eric Luse in 1993. He captioned it, “The men in white are the surviving members of the original San Francisco Gay Men’s choir (sic). The others represent those lost to AIDS.”

Luse released the same photo in 1996, saying, “The Gay Men’s Chorus posed to illustrate the impact of AIDS. Those dressed in black, with their backs turned, represent those who had died. Today, all their backs would be turned because the obituary list is now 47 names longer than the chorus roster. For each man singing these days, more than one chorus member has died of AIDS.”

Or look at the AIDS Quilt.

Per the aidsquilt.org website, “The Quilt was conceived in November of 1985 by long-time San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones. Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped organize the annual candlelight march honoring these men. While planning the 1985 march, he learned that over 1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS. He asked each of his fellow marchers to write on placards the names of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS. At the end of the march, Jones and others stood on ladders taping these placards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt. Inspired by this sight, Jones and friends made plans for a larger memorial.”

Looking up how big it is now, the website reads, “As of June 2016, The AIDS Memorial Quilt is composed of more than 49,000 panels on 5,956 blocks (blocks are the twelve foot square building blocks of The Quilt seen at displays). Most blocks are composed of 8 separate panels, remembering the lives of eight individuals lost to AIDS.”

Here’s the AIDS Quilt laid out on the National Mall:

The scope of it all is just staggering. How much generational knowledge did the LGBT community lose in less than a couple of decades? Our elders, the ones who had survived far worse stigma, far worse violence, taken from us in silence. The Stonewall Riots were in 1969 — how many people who were there in those years of activism are with us still, and how many were taken before we even knew how badly we need them?

What’s the quickest way to kill a rebellion? It’s not taking away rights, or starving people, or punishing the ring-leaders. It is, and always has been, silencing human memory. When you take away those with knowledge, those with experience, those who gained scars in the name of their cause, the people left behind have no choice but to start over. It puts them at a constant disadvantage against the power.

Now, back to “Seasons of Love.”

Think about that song and realize that the LGBT community in those years were measuring their years in death, in funerals, in loss, in new diagnoses.

“In truth that she learned
Or in times that he cried
In bridges he burned
Or the way that she died.”

And it ends on the line, “Remember the love.”

It is a fucking miracle that the LGBT community held together in those years, and held together so strongly that they could lead the next generation in a new wave of rebellion and activism and change.

But that miracle? That isn’t a miracle given by a deity or some inhuman act.

It is a very human miracle. Perhaps the most human miracle of all. Because of those who survived, those who remained, not all of them ever recovered. Not all of them ever returned to living the way they had been before the blight of AIDS in their lives. But those who did, those who found their voices in the chaos, those who fought and kept fighting, those who loved and kept loving, their power, their strength — THAT is what cannot be measured.

Because they remembered love. They remembered those they had lost, and promises they had made. They remembered the truth of being themselves. They remembered the tiny points of hope and humanity in amidst the horror.

I sang this song at the end of every stupid concert in middle school and high school and never knew. My sheltered life meant I barely knew of the existence of the LGBT community until college. I had NO IDEA the damage done to my own people, the ordeal with which my would-be peers and leaders and elders had been faced.

I sang this song and thought I understood love, thought I understood “moments so dear.”

Now, I’m not sure I understand it at all. Because I don’t actually know if I could live even one year like that hell and come out the other end able to sing “remember the love.” I don’t actually know if my own heart could remain intact after decades of grief. I don’t know if I have the fortitude to be one of the survivors.

And yet the song begs you to try. It begs you to measure life in love, because that’s the only thing that matters, the only way forward, the only light in the darkness.

And then, tellingly, it ends. It doesn’t end triumphantly, with a grand final chord and a golden sound. It ends abruptly, softly, into silence.

Maybe that’s the silence left in grief. Maybe it’s the silence left of hope. Maybe it’s the silence waiting for the future to create the next sound.

For me, it’s the silence of the question to which I still have no answer.

How do you measure a year?

How do you measure a life?

What will you remember?

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Spoons, and the songs that tell painful true stories

Posted on by KMClantoren

I had a conversation with a friend on Saturday.  We were talking about how each of us is doing, how we’re holding together through a rough patch, and we rounded to the topic of spoons per the Spoon Theory.  It’s an analogy coined by Christine Miserandino, if you don’t know it, and it helps illustrate the effort that it takes to get through the day with limited energy or health or pain tolerance or illness.  Healthy, fully-able-bodied people don’t have to count their spoons because they don’t have to think about the energy expenditures of “everyday” activities. But for those with a chronic illness, or mental illness, or an autoimmune disorder, or a disability, even tasks that might be described as “normal” simply aren’t.

I’ve been close to running out of spoons a lot lately as this downswing chews up my energy and ability to cope.  Half the world feels like it’s uphill, or at the top of a flight of stairs, and while I *can* make the climb, it takes something out of me to do it, something I don’t get back easily or quickly.

This literally was my situation this weekend at a choir concert where we had to go up and down several flights of metal stairs and my knee chose not to work without pain and a brace.

But the concert required me to give up spoons in more important ways, too.

It was a collaboration between the TCWC and the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus.  The concert was called “Rise Up!” and was a call to action for social justice. It was fun to be invited, of course, and to share the stage with the ever-outstanding TCGMC.  It gave us a chance to sing a few songs we’ll be performing in May, to really work towards something early in the season.

But, most importantly, the concert MATTERED.

This wasn’t a concert for singing “Kumbaya” and telling child-friendly versions of the world we hope to live in someday.  This wasn’t a night of celebrating our shared humanity and looking into that potential with optimism and hope.

This was, in many ways, a brutal reckoning of the world as it exists today.  And I choose the word “brutal” very deliberately.

We did sing songs about rising up together, about the brave people in whose footsteps we walk, about speaking out for those in need.

But we also sang songs about rape and about murder.

The TCWC will be performing “Quiet” by MILCK in May — it’s a powerful piece that was written to be performed at the Women’s March in Washington DC in 2017 and relates to the silence around sexual harassment and sexual assault, domestic violence, and even depression.  You can find it here.

After two months of practice, I could mostly sing the song with strength and defiance and not feel the biting of my own ways of identifying with it.  I was prepared for that much.

I wasn’t truly prepared for “Til It Happens To You” and the heart-breaking story that accompanied it as told by by a strong, brave man willing to share his rape experience with a room of a thousand strangers.

And on the heels of that, I was even less ready for “The Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.”

I wish I could tell you that you don’t really have to listen to them, that you can accept that these songs exist without needing to engrave them on your heart.  I wish I could tell you that our world is a better place than this, that the pain of people who are suffering, who are being hurt, who are being killed — I wish it was the exception.

If I’ve ever hated anything in my life, I hate that this is the norm.

I hate that this is what our world is, hate that I can’t say it’s a new thing, hate that I can’t pretend I didn’t know it was this bad.  I did know. I’ve seen it everywhere, from the day my eyes opened. Even if I didn’t know what I was looking at, it was there.

I hate that in this world where we are capable of so much beauty, so much art, so much love and kindness and wonder and wisdom, that we are just as culpable of such harm and hate and evil.

And I hate that it cost me spoons to be a part of that concert, to stand and sing those songs, to hear them sung, to know their painful, inhumane truth — when all I had to endure was singing.  If it cost me spoons to be a part of a call to action, what does it cost those for whom the action is most necessary just to live?

It isn’t my fault that I’m a white cis-woman.  That I don’t have to live under the same kinds of fears of people of color, or people who are trans.  It isn’t my fault that I am able-bodied and I don’t have to live in a world that constantly mistreats disabilities.  It’s also not my fault that I am a woman who married a woman — and sometimes we both have to live in a world which can be frightfully cruel and punishing just for that fact.

We are all exactly what we are, and we all have our own challenges.  I remind people (and myself) sometimes that pain is relative. For example, I’ve never broken an arm, so if I did, I imagine that would be the worst pain in my life.  But someone who has been shot, or stabbed, might think that a broken arm is nothing in comparison. And they’re right. Every person only knows as much pain — or as much joy — as they’ve ever experienced.  And you can’t compare my pain to yours, only show empathy and respect for both.

But I know, as a woman married to a woman I actually do know, that the pain of being a part of a concert which was important, which was necessary, which was needed, is absolutely nothing to suffering under the reasons WHY it was important and necessary and needed.  To be reminded of the horrors is nothing to living them.

Even so, I still had trouble with my spoons.  The number you get at any given moment doesn’t neatly correspond to the number you need, and it isn’t constant from day to day or even minute to minute.  Some days, I don’t have to count them. But right now, in this downswing, I do. And right now, in this downswing, I handed them over to be a part of something painful, something necessary.

And it can never be enough.  It’s like the thing about “thoughts and prayers.”  If giving up all my spoons would make the world better, I would do it in a heartbeat.  But it doesn’t work that way. I can’t just pray and hope that somehow the world will spontaneously improve.  The only actions that work are *actions.* Protesting, voting, having difficult conversations, donating, raising awareness, calling out cruelty where it happens — we have to put boots on the ground, hands in the air, votes in the boxes, dollars in the hands of those with the right power, and words in the minds of people who need to hear them.

This concert was not an *empty* call to action, after all.  And I have work to do. We ALL have work to do.

But right now?  I still don’t have the spoons.  My bipolar brain can only do so much, and today it can’t even do that.

So, for now, I’m going to keep hunting for spoons.  I’m going to dig them up, find them in shadows and tucked-away corners.  I’m going to hoard them like a dragon with its treasures. I’m going to find as many as I can, to get me through until I don’t need to count anymore.

And then I’ll trade the spoons for another round of actions.

Because it is a privilege that I can choose to do so — and all I can do is make it count.

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Dead and Counting

Posted on by KMClantoren

(I will never pretend that I have any true gift for poetry, because I haven’t. But what I have is pain and rage and choking helplesness and grief. And this is its outlet.

Please forgive its every flaw and the person who was alive to make them. The only thing that matters is those who are lost, and those who are hurt, and those who are now both.)

 

Dead and Counting

You were dead in a roar of thunder
Before your body fell
And the body beside you
And the next and the next.
You died laughing, or screaming,
Or crying out to Jesus or Allah or Shiva
“Why” or “Please” or “No”
But no one saved you.
You died in a hail of hatred.

You did not die alone.
And one tragedy becomes two
Becomes twenty
Becomes too many
And the street is red
And the lights flash blue
And no one wants to score the dead.

There will come reasons, shouting,
“It’s your fault, you people!”
“It’s you who are to blame!”
But the blame we parade on sets and soundbites
Doesn’t kill the tears or the pain
Doesn’t cure the nightmares of those
Whose hands knew blood that night.

And we forget to blame hatred.
We forget.
Again we forget.

We light candles and sing
Signs and flowers and wreaths
We change banners and pictures
We hashtag our pain and prayers
We say we will remember
But we hate and teach hate and grow hate
And the candles are not soft memories now.
They are become the start of the next wildfire.

Forgive our tears
That we mean today
And will forget tomorrow.
Forgive our candles, our songs,
Our momentary grief
That will last in your bones.
We died tonight
Or yesterday
In any hail of hatred
And only still live by forgetting

You died,
You,
Whose name we do not know.
But you died in a war
Not between lines on a map
But within the human soul —
You died and we died with you.
We are your blood, cold on the street.

But you do not know this.
You do not have to know.
You already know.

You were dead in a roar of thunder
Before your body fell
And the body beside you
And the next and the next.
You died laughing, or screaming, or sobbing
Or crying out to Jesus or Allah or Shiva
“Why” or “Please” or “No”
But no one saved you.
We all die in a hail of hatred.

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September 11th

Posted on by KMClantoren

September 11th really gets under my skin.

September 11th means a lot of things to a lot of people. But at the moment, I can’t get my head out of what it means for me.

September 11th, 2001, was my second day at college. Instead of adjusting to a new schedule and thinking about new classes and friends and everything else, I woke up at 8:30ish CT to my dad calling the room. He told me he was okay – he was supposed to have been at the World Trade Center because he had a monthly trip out there for work, but because of driving me to Minnesota, it had been rescheduled. And he told me there had been an attack. I remember thinking it didn’t seem real.

I wandered down the hall of my dorm, still unfamiliar, still scary in its own right, to the lounge. There, the TV was on with the live coverage. One tower had already collapsed. I remember feeling so numb, so lost. I was already in a new place alone and adrift, and suddenly even reality didn’t seem real. I sat on the floor just inside the door and watched the second tower fall. I remember thinking I should have been crying and I remember not knowing why I wasn’t.

A junior who lived on the floor 2 or 3 doors down from me (and I remember his face and his voice but I’ve long since lost his name) sat beside me and asked if I was okay. And then he put me together with my door and realized it said there in big letters that I was from New York. And he realized I wasn’t okay. So he put an arm around me for a while.

Others came in from the floor, and a few from upstairs where I think the TV wasn’t working. There was a girl on the floor from NYC who was in her room trying to call her mom crying hysterically and her roommate asked the RA to come help. The kid from Iraq and the kid from Saudi Arabia came into the lounge and were horrified, but they retreated to their room soon after and people mentioned they might be scared. Already the news was making noise about Muslim terrorists, and the kid from Pakistan wouldn’t look at any of us.

I remember going to class with a new professor and he was cold. He said he didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t want to bring it into our freshman seminar. And I understand the value of going on with the day, but that…lack of empathy. I think now it must have been a coping mechanism, but I never forgave him while I was in that class for what felt so callous.

I remember the college called an emergency convocation and we crowded into the chapel together. I remember sitting with someone…but not who; I only knew a handful of people then. I remember still feeling so cold and numb and lost and I still didn’t cry even though I tried. Fuck, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry because I wanted someone to make it okay and there was no one. I wanted someone to pull out of their feelings so they could help me with my own because I had no understanding of how to handle what I was feeling.

What’s strange is that I don’t remember much more than that from that particular day. I remember checking the news – everyone was checking the news – and finding out about Flight 93. I remember feeling instantly grateful to be so far away from New York, as though that insulated me from the reality and my reaction. And I remember the rush of gratitude and pride that, even in the days and weeks afterwards, there was no backlash on my college’s campus against people from the Middle East or people who were Muslim or people who LOOKED Muslim. The backlash that happened in other places sickened me, and I was so, so glad to be around people who did not retaliate.

For most people, it was a day of tragedy and it led to a lot of ugly politics and a war and fear and many other things, but for me, it changed everything. Because I was a political science major and had been on that path since my junior year of high school. I was an international relations student and I wanted, I desperately wanted, to save the world. I arrived at a college especially chosen for its international relations program ready to march into a chaotic world and do some good.

And September 11th changed the very world I hoped to save.

I’ve long said that I chose not to continue into government work because of Sarah and the friends I had whom I didn’t want to leave, but I think that may only be fifty percent of the answer. The other fifty happened when the United States reacted to the attacks with war and hate and despicable rhetoric. The other fifty percent happened when September 11th scared me, both for what might happen to me out in the world if I served the US government, and for what the US government might do with me.

How could I lend my will and hope and talent to a government run by a warmonger who went into the wrong goddamn country just to appease what looked like latent daddy issues? How could I serve abroad when my very name and face and job could make me a target? How could I work in Washington DC and try to “protect” this country from a threat when that threat was defined by those in power as anyone whose skin and beliefs vaguely (and sometimes not even vaguely) resembled the hijackers’?

The world I wanted to save died on September 11th. Maybe not in reality, but certainly in me, it died. And I found I didn’t want to be a part of a system that killed civilians while arresting and detaining and torturing them. I found I didn’t want to be affiliated with the lies that my advisor debunked in class within days of the US presentation to the UN of the so-called WMDs in Iraq. I found I didn’t want to carry the United States like a badge into a part of the world we had rightly pissed off just because we were too stupid or too clumsy to tell the difference.

I saw the videos. I read the news. I followed the reactions. People worldwide started to view the United States as a racist, bigoted, violent, war-hungry nation because that is how we were acting. And I decided I didn’t want to help them do it.

I love this country. I have always loved this country. And to join in such actions and decisions felt like a betrayal to everything I love about the US, everything that makes it good. Everything that makes ANY nation good. I could not be a traitor to the ideals of justice and equal treatment and peace, not when those very ideals were coming second to ideas like “security” and “prevention.”

After September 11th, it’s possible the United States needed someone like me more than it ever had, but I just wasn’t strong enough to answer that call. I wasn’t strong enough to face down those men in power. I wrote my final senior thesis on the political philosophy behind espionage because it was the closest I could get to actually studying What The Hell Is The US Doing And Here Is What It Will Do To Us All without grief.

September 11th was a national and international tragedy and the beginning of many more. It was a day of death and sorrow and pain and fear, and it kicked off far more to come. What it is to the world cannot be understated.

It’s not remote to me now. I didn’t lose a friend or loved one in the Towers like my dad did. I didn’t breathe in the carcinogenic dust like the brave men and women who did their best to save lives.

But something in me died that day, and it is a pain that never goes away. Any time I see the NYC skyline, I ache for what is no longer there. Or in movies that haven’t been edited, I ache when I see the Towers stand. I ache because when they broke and fell, they took a piece of me with them. They took my future. Me the Diplomat-to-Be died that day, too. I hurt for the people of my nation and my state and my city (because NYC is MINE as much as it is anyone’s who has ever loved it, anyone’s who has ever walked its streets and felt strangely at home) and I will never stop hurting for them.

And I have never yet stopped hurting for myself, either.

September 11th, 2001 happened to me. It happened to me and it changed me, and while my suffering is nothing, NOTHING, like those who lost loved ones at Ground Zero or the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania, it is no less real. And after it happened to me and it happened to the world, then the suffering went outwards in wars and bombings and retaliation and detainments and invasions. The cycle of violence and pain was exacerbated and spread to hundreds of thousands or millions of people who were just as innocent as those on the planes.

People forget what 9/11 began when they remember 9/11, but I never can. Because I remember my Iraqi floormate whose hometown was involved in fighting before we graduated. I remember my childhood friend and companion and protector, who was called to two tours in Iraq and for whom I was scared all the time.

It happened to me and then it happened to the world. And it KEEPS ON happening because we have learned NOTHING as a people. And maybe, maybe I should have found the courage and stood up and tried to be the change that is so needed. But I don’t have that kind of power.

And maybe that’s also why September 11th gets to me so much. Not only was it traumatic and tied up in the biggest period of upheaval in my life to date, and not only was it a defining moment for my future and choices and career, and not only was it outright horrific in every particular but for the selfless, wonderful heroes who ran into fire and ruin to save lives. But because I can’t forget all the people it happened to, people whose lives were never the same, people who have to live with it in their hearts even if they were nowhere near the attacks themselves. 9/11 isn’t just about the Towers and the Pentagon and Flight 93. It’s about Afghanistan. Iraq. Guantanamo. All that suffering, all those lives, all the weight of that terror and trauma in the world, and it happened to us all.

And there was nothing I could do to stop it, not any part of it. Not the hijackers. Not the invasion of Iraq. Not the prisoners STILL FUCKING HELD without their rights. I was just a little girl, 19 years old and without having grown any true courage yet. By the time I had courage enough, it was too late. The world had been broken and there was nothing I could do to fix it.

They say “Never forget.” But people do. People hoist flags and make speeches or just go, “Oh, it’s nine-eleven. That was so sad.” And they go on. They forget.

But September 11th is STILL HAPPENING to people. It’s still happening to me, too. I will never be able to honestly look at my life and know in my heart that it was all okay. Because September 11th scared me off a hill where I believed I was born to stand, and that future was lost.

I love my life. I love the people in my life. I am not usually sorry for the choices I made; indeed, being in this life has given me opportunities and friends and chances I never would have found otherwise and I wouldn’t give them up for anything. But on any September 11th, two painful days after my birthday, I can feel the difference. The difference of what I could have been. Of where I could have gone. Of the other work I could have done. Of a time I put my head down when I could have stood up. Because who knows what might have changed and whose lives might have been spared if I had been there?

On September 11th, 2001, heroes shone bright against hate and evil. And I was too busy being numb and shocked and scared and lost to join them. I didn’t hug anyone else. I didn’t help. And I went on to not help. I went on to evade the hard work of making things right rather than digging in. It took me several years to analyze that day and what I did right and wrong, so I could teach myself to do better next time. So that I can be one of the helpers, and not one of those needing the help in the moment of crisis.

But I also never forget that I went on to become what I am because I had that luxury. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t have that choice. It wasn’t just my perceptions of the world that died in the aftermath of that day; it was my perceptions of myself. And all of that is completely worthless compared to the lives lost worldwide. I may have my own memories and feelings to deal with, but I will never, ever forget that my feelings are NOTHING to the true harm that came to the world that day and every day since.

 

So on any September 11th, you’ll find I lapse silent throughout the day. I get melancholy. I have trouble laughing or relaxing. I retreat and stop reaching out. I have a small downswing into depression.

It’s the day so many, many lives were ruined forever, and not just in NYC or the Pentagon or on Flight 93.

It’s the day fear spread far more quickly than a wildfire, and it was followed by pain and violence that has never since let up.

And it’s the day my dreams died and were replaced with a profound awareness that nothing I ever did with my life, no matter how spectacular or mundane, would ever make the world right again.

Forget September 11th, 2001? How could I?

Its shadow still falls all over my life, even on the brightest days. And I’m just a nobody in the Midwest who DIDN’T lose limbs or liberty or loved ones.

So when you remember 9/11? Don’t just remember the towers and the planes. Remember the people in other countries whose lives have been torn up. Remember every person who ever looked up in the sky of NYC and felt like running and hiding. Remember every person in every country who felt like they would never be safe again because of their heritage or their religion or their culture. Because 9/11 happened to us all.

Never forget that.

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