Happy September 11

(The following rather long essay is my contribution to the Voices project, in which Michele is diligently collecting various people's experiences on September 11, 2001. Here's more info on the project and why she is doing it.)

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To me, September 11 will always be a happy, joyful day.

Even my memories of September 11, 2001 will be cheerful ones.

“WHY?” you may ask in horror, and then justifiably insist that I give you a damn good reason.

OK, I will. My wonderful beautiful son Eitan was born on September 11, 1996. I can’t even blame the choice of the date on fate: I scheduled it – it was an induced delivery.

So I will not allow terrorists to ruin the birthday of my firstborn child, nor the memory of his fifth birthday. I refuse.

I will celebrate on September 11 every single year, no matter what.

Yes, of course I will mourn and remember the victims of the terror attacks, but not necessarily on that day. It’s going to be hard enough for him having that birthday, and at least his mother should be able to celebrate with him. About to turn seven, he is still happily oblivious of what his birthday means to everyone else. When adults ask him what his birthday is and he tells him, they say nothing, just share a sympathetic, eye-rolling look with me. How I wish, wish, wish that someone had thought of a name for the day like “Pearl Harbor Day” or “V-J Day.” Something, anything other than simply saying “September 11.” But that didn’t happen and it doesn’t look as though it ever will.

I will admit that September 11, 2001 was a completely surreal day for me and one that I will never forget. As luck would have it, that was probably the only day on which I ever actually scheduled one of my children’s birthday parties on their actual birthday.

I live in a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. The time difference between Israel and the United States is seven hours. Eitan’s birthday party was scheduled for 4 PM. So when the attacks happened, I was deep in party preparation mode, battening down the hatches for the invasion of 20 small children and their moms.

It was my mother-in-law, who was in the car heading to my house from Jerusalem to the party with the birthday cake, who heard the news on the radio, and called me to turn on the television – just as my first guests were arriving.

Since it was early September, and Eitan hadn’t really gotten to know the kids in his kindergarten class yet, the party was mostly made up of my friends and their children. Nearly all of my friends are American and Canadian born. So as each child walked in the door, I would have to pull the mom aside and break the news.

The whole afternoon felt like I was part of the cast of a play, acting up a storm. We, the moms, acted happy, cheerful smiling, facilitating the party, organizing games, serving cake, lighting candles, snapping pictures and singing Happy Birthday, while inside we were experiencing shock, horror and disbelief. There were the children frolicking, having fun, while their mothers were quietly freaking out.

We couldn’t put on the television downstairs where the children could see and hear, so we kept sneaking upstairs to catch a glimpse of CNN or check the Internet, and try to get hold of our families.

I didn’t worry about anyone until I heard the news that one of the planes that hit the towers had taken off from Boston – that is when I began frantically calling (to no avail) and E-mailing. My brother Adam works in hi-tech in Boston and travels for business several times a week.

As it turned out, I had reason for worry. He came close. One of the planes that hit the towers was the American Airlines Flight 11 headed from Boston to Los Angeles. Adam was scheduled to fly on American from Boston to San Francisco, on a flight that was scheduled to leave a half hour later. In the American Airlines club that morning, he had greeted several of the passengers he knew on Flight 11. They boarded their ill-fated plane and shortly afterwards, he boarded his.

His flight never left the ground. News of the attacks came before their take-off and the passengers on his Flight were returned to Logan Airport, held there without explanation, and finally allowed to go home. It wasn’t until he was in his car that he learned what had happened. How frighteningly easy it could have been for him to be on Flight 11. His plan, if the San Francisco flight had been booked full, was to fly to LA and then continue north to San Francisco.

Thank god it wasn’t.

As for the reaction to the events in Israel, we were stunned and devastated, despite the fact that we were painfully familiar with terrorism. The truth is that we were used to terrorism happening to US. And we were used to the idea of the United States being a nice safe haven where these kind of things don’t happen. Israeli travel to New York for vacation, or they move there temporarily or permanently, in order to be far away from the Middle East, to be in a place where you don’t have to think about terrorism, where there aren’t security guards at every entrance, where every home doesn’t have an emergency stock of bottled water and duct tape. It was deeply frightening for a country which views America as its protector and defender to see America’s vulnerability. It still is.

We were very scared at first that somehow we would get blamed for it, that Americans would say, “If it wasn’t for Israel, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Thank goodness that for the most part, this hasn’t happened.

In fact, we feel closer to American than ever before. Personally, I do have a sense that Americans understand and sympathize with Israelis more after September 11. In one sense, that fact is wonderful and comforting. But at the same time, I hate that my fellow Americans have come to resemble my fellow Israelis.

I used to love traveling home to the U.S. to regain that sense of protectedness, safeness, naiveté that I had in the United States, where I spent the first 28 years of my life – and it just doesn’t exist any more. Especially in New York and Washington.

I haven’t been back to Ground Zero yet. It used to be familiar territory. I never lived or worked there during the two years I was a New Yorker, but it became my home as a tourist. My favorite hotel was the Millenium Hilton, right across from the towers. I used to get rooms that looked directly into the Plaza, and I spent hours browsing the Borders bookstore in the mall complex at the bottom, shopping for clothes for my Children at The Children’s Place there. I can still picture it perfectly in my mind’s eye, and on a deep level, haven’t yet registered that it is no longer there.

Sometimes I wonder which is worse, this large-scale devastating mega-terror that occurred on September 11, or the disheartening, never-ending parade of violence that we in Israel experience day after day, week after week. Frankly, I think I would choose September 11 over this endless nightmare of violence.

One thing that has bothered me a bit has been the refrain of my peer group in the United States. The world changed on September 11, they say, and they want the old world back.

But there was no old world -- only the illusion of one. The truth is that the world didn’t change. The truth is that the world has been a cruel, scary, nasty, unpredictable place for a very long time. Americans merely had the luxury of feeling safe and protected from it.

Americans of my generation, for whom Vietnam is a mere faint childhood memory, Korea is a bunch of MASH episodes, and the two World Wars are the stuff of history books, had the luck to spend the first half of their lives in the uniquely safe, secure golden era in the America of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Yes, we had the Cold War, but that always seemed like more of a far-away, theoretical idea than a close-range, bloody threat, and it had a happy ending. In Gulf War 1, Saddam threatened Kuwait, but not us. In general, bad scary awful things happened Out There, but inside the protected bubble of the United States, it seemed like nothing could really touch us.

It was a wonderful era while it lasted. But it’s over. Clearly, it was not sustainable. But I wish it hadn’t had to end with such a cruel, painful, unbelievable event like the September 11 attacks. Nobody should have to be smacked in the face that hard by reality. But it is reality.

The world we live in is full of threats, and we can't wish them away. We must fight them. And we must never, ever forget.

Posted by allisonks at September 5, 2003 03:30 PM