(I wrote this seven years ago.)
After 9/11 I told myself stories about smallpox and anthrax and how long it would take me to actually run from work to my daughter’s daycare (18 minutes in heels). I told myself stories about the people around me—who was supportive, who aggravated my grief. I was one of the victims of 9/11 because I told myself I was. But there aren’t too many of us who, years later, are still spooked on a daily basis about terrorism. It went away.
I was blessed by the events of September 11th. That time, easily the most depressed and hopeless period in my adult life, made possible—made necessary—the deepest self-exploration of my life. When those two planes hit me, I caught fire and crumbled to the ground. I had been girded with steel and had stood longer and stronger than the two tallest towers on the island of Manhattan. As stunned as I was to watch the towers of the World Trade Center crumble, I was even more stunned to watch myself crumble over the minutes, days and weeks that followed.
Two towers tumbled, and I was wide open, looking inside, squinting through the soot.
On the afternoon of September 10th, 2001, I was having my car repaired and I sat on a bench in the sun at a Volkswagen dealership for two hours, reading. The book was Alice Miller’s, The Truth Will Set You Free. I didn’t know this book or its author when I bought it. It was one of those instances where a book jumped off the shelf into my hands. I’d actually bought it for my husband, though I don’t remember why. He looked at the backs of the two books I brought home that day and decided that the other one had something for him, but that Miller did not. So I read it. For him.
And then, three pages into it, I read it for me.
Alice Miller, like so many great writers, writes the same book over and over. She takes a single topic—specifically, the physical punishment (“beating,” as she so unselfconsciously calls it) of children—and turns it over and over showing each of its surfaces, painting and scraping her topic until it is so familiar and so finely cut that it penetrates the skin of those who touch it.
But that’s only if you get past the first chapter. First you figure out what she’s talking about. Then, if you realize she’s talking about you, you have a decision to make: Is she right or is she wrong? Did my parents who spanked me beat me? If no one ever pushed me down a flight of stairs or burned me with a cigarette, was I “abused?” If my parents did the very best they could from the most altruistic love they could muster, isn’t it at all possible that I am not scarred by whatever else they did to me? This is the point at which you decide that Miss Miller is pandering to crybabies. She’s planting “recovered” memories into her readers. She’s digging up something that’s better left buried.
Or you decide that she has written your autobiography, and that you had damned well better read it.
I read Alice Miller for two hours on a sunny bench on September 10th, 2001. While 21 hijackers were checking and rechecking their plans to level lower Manhattan and to set the Pentagon and White House ablaze, I was unwittingly preparing myself to crack open.
Early the next morning I was back at the dealership for one more tweak. I had been on a news-fast and had traded my normal National Public Radio for Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits. I sat on a bench in the shade this time, same book in hand. Even in my relative indifference to my surroundings, I was struck that this morning at the dealership was much busier than the afternoon before it had been—such a feeling of urgency to it. Then I got a call. A friend called to tell me that the strangest thing had happened. A plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and then a few minutes later, another plane flew into the other tower. She said it so calmly—with no worry, only wonder.
I remember saying something equally calm—and now, I realize, so oddly dismissive, “Wow, that is so Nostradamus…” “It’s going to be a weird day,” she said.
The activity at the dealership sped up; employees were paged to the phones one after another. I heard the name of someone I knew, the brother of a friend. A few minutes later a man drove up, got out of his car, and sat next to me on the bench. He looked down for a moment, exhaled deeply, and said, “They got the Pentagon.”
That’s when I noticed that I felt unsafe.
The feeling was familiar. Something bad was happening, and I didn’t know what. Other people seemed to know and they might tell me if I asked them, but it didn’t feel safe to ask. I wanted to hear it from a source I could trust, see it for myself, understand it. Moments later I was in my car, radio on. But I still didn’t know what was happening.
Do you recall that while the events of September 11th were unfolding, they did not have a face? Yet only a few days later, if I pictured the towers burning and falling, that image was followed closely by a filmic cut-to of Osama Bin Laden rubbing his hands together in triumph. (Later the film was re-edited by the post-production staff of the Bush-Cheney White House, somehow splicing Saddam Hussein into the same frame with Bin Laden, the two evildoers smiling and nodding to each other, not sure whether to embrace.) But it didn’t happen that way. On that day, we didn’t know who our enemies were. We were like children, trusting. We didn’t see it coming. In our naiveté we thought everybody loved us.
They were supposed to love us. Certainly we had misbehaved, but we didn’t have it coming.
Within hours, 9/11 became a series of stories to most of us—those of us who watched, not from Manhattan sidewalks or Brooklyn rooftops, but on TV. This one’s niece was supposed to go to a morning meeting on the top floor of Tower One, but it was cancelled at the last minute. That one’s brother was a janitor in Tower Two and was incinerated alive in only seconds. It didn’t matter whether you knew the people or not, you listened to the stories and passed them along because it felt better to keep them moving than it did to let them rest. Then ribbons and tears and searches and people who wouldn’t give up; the occasional, oddly reassuring drone of military planes overhead; then flags and more flags. Then smallpox and anthrax and a quiet settling into the feeling of being unsafe.
Twenty-six days later, war. And over Afghanistan, we—we—began dropping bombs and food at the same time. It was a campaign to win the war and the peace simultaneously. It was the same campaign parents wage when they beat their children and then try to make up with a curt, “You know I still love you…”
Barbara Bush does not sugar-coat the fact that she hit her children. On October 7th, 2001, no one had to tell me that.
Michael Moore was making the documentary, Bowling for Columbine during the events of September 11th. He was stomping across America trying to figure out why Americans kill each other at rates that dwarf those of other industrialized nations. In the film he never quite voices his conclusion, but he tells us none-the-less. Americans kill each other because they feel unsafe. What no one seems to be able to tell us, however, is why Americans feel unsafe.
Alice Miller and Adolph Hitler both grew up in Germanic countries, only a generation apart. Germans beat their children then, as per the pedagogy of the day, as did most Europeans and most Americans. In The Truth Will Set You Free, Miller writes about the influence of the “enlightened witness.” It’s the influence of the enlightened witness that keeps an Alice Miller from turning into an Adolph Hitler. The witness is someone who sees what’s happening, someone who knows you’re being beaten and indicates somehow that he or she knows it isn’t right. These witnesses rarely intercede—at least they didn’t previous to the 1970’s when information about the damaging effects of physically punishing children began to see daylight. Before then, parents owned their children in ways that seem repugnant to most of us now, but which were regarded as normal only a few generations ago.
America itself has had its share of enlightened witnesses. Frederick Douglas, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Margaret Sanger, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dr. King, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Michael Moore.
Funny thing about that list. When it comes to America’s social critics, we usually like them better dead.
The Thanksgiving after 9/11 I set out to visit my childhood home for the first time since the tragedies. I went with my husband and my 2 ½-year-old daughter. She was the very age I was when my mother started slapping my hand as I reached for something dangerous—the same age I was when my cells learned that my chief protector might also hit me.
Over two months had past; I’d stopped listening to the radio every waking minute and was tapering off of my ritualistic “just checking now and then,” listening always for the distinct sound of a news bulletin or press conference. One of my oldest childhood memories is of being in the backseat of my parents’ car listening to the radio, hearing news reports of Black Panthers and urban guerillas, forming the half articulated thought that I could meet up with a vicious animal around any corner. A few weeks into the war, when the Afghan Rebels were still called the Northern Alliance, my daughter looked up at me at the breakfast table during a news report, her ear snagged on the word alliance, and inquired with uncharacteristic concern, “Lions?” I reached down and hugged her and said, “No, honey. He didn’t say ‘lions’; it was just a word that sounded the same.”
That Thanksgiving my family received us warmly. I’d had some contact with my mother since 9/11, but I’d found it difficult to take comfort from her. What I would not allow her at that time was piety. It made me think of the pious people in the Bible stories I’d heard growing up. We were taught to scorn the Pharisees for their prideful piety, and we knew that whomever would exalt himself would surely be humbled. It never occurred to us that we hated their piety because it so closely mirrored the worst in us. It certainly never occurred to me, as I quietly judged my mother’s own authentic sorrow as piety, that I would never even have recognized it, if it were not also a quality of mine.
My judgment was on high alert that visit. And, as much as I told myself stories to the contrary, I was lying in wait to condemn my mother for what she had done to me. In my quiet, carefully sheathed rage, I wanted only to shame my mother. I didn’t have to wait long.
My daughter is a willful child. Her manners were only fair at two, and she was charming almost beyond imagining—not treacley, but rather so contagious in her excitement that most people made no effort to dissuade her. My daughter thought she was the boss, but that was my mother’s job. A few hours into our visit Ella asserted herself, and my mother stomped. She put a look of mock outrage on her face and stomped her foot in the direction of my 30 pound daughter, lurching forward no more than a few inches in the process.
I watched. And when my daughter cried I comforted her. My mother, slightly embarrassed, sniffed her disapproval at my coddling my child over something so silly as the notion that she might be afraid of her own grandmother stomping and lurching at her. I was quiet.
Hours later when my daughter was asleep I brought the subject up. “Mom, you know that thing before—when you stomped at Ella? I don’t want you to do that again.” She began to defend herself, and I interrupted— “I just don’t want her to have that experience.” My mother pooh-poohed it as silliness. “Oh, she knows I would never hurt her. Who was it who used to stomp? One of you kids…”
But at 2 ½, the only thing children know for sure is that they are about to learn something new every second.
It is not so inconceivable that Ella would learn to be threatened by her grandmother when her grandmother pretends to threaten her. “Please,” I said, my piety naked. “Please.”
That night on the way back to the hotel I told my husband how I felt about what happened. I said that I felt I’d handled it as well as anyone could—I’d liked who I was in that moment well enough, and that was the benchmark I was aiming for. I’d taken a stand, but I didn’t confront my mother—at least not about what I’d wanted to confront her about. Somehow that counted for something. I cried myself to sleep that night, not knowing what I was crying about, my poor husband at an even greater loss.
The ride from my hometown to my current home is over many rivers and through lots of woods. And in those woods, there are deer. About half-way through our 400-mile trek home, my husband drove as I dozed in the back seat with Ella. I heard a screech, felt a swerve, and then experienced the unmistakable feeling of impact. I reached for Ella, still asleep in her car seat.
As my husband pulled off the freeway, our car crumpled, limping, and leaking, everyone was fine except the deer.
The woods were deep enough to choke a city cell phone, but a woman stopped soon after the crash with what looked like a military field telephone and called the state troopers for us. They got us a tow and took us to a motel for the night. Ella slept through the whole thing, and the next day she could not figure out why, if we left the hotel room, we would not find the rest of grandma’s house on the other side of the door. The next day we rented a car and drove home.
The story of September 11th is for nearly all of us, a story of going home. It sent me into my childhood, back to my first home and to my first experiences of what it was like to live in my home. But more directly, it’s the story of hundreds of thousands of people being stranded far from home. And of them wanting to get home desperately. It’s the story of people at work running to schools and daycare centers to pick up their children, or running home to watch TV. Of people out of town, racing to rent the last available vehicle to drive 1000 miles home. The road home was long and pitted with obstacles. And in those first hours, we were not sure that if we got on that road, the end of the road would still be there.
But home is where our focus went—either we tried without success to get there, or we did get there and we stayed there.
America is changed since 9/11. But it’s not because we are afraid of war or terrorism; it’s not because of a big hole in lower Manhattan. It’s because we all went home at the same time. Tens of millions of Americans went home—to each other—with red eyes and open hearts. We witnessed for each other what had been done to each of us and we said that it was not right.
But a few Americans were denied that witness. A few Americans flew in military planes from one undisclosed location to the next, hiding in bunkers, communicating in secret, planning retaliation disguised as justice. A few Americans did not go home. And later, when America’s enlightened witnesses (those who did not have the courtesy to be dead) spoke, those who had not gone home, did not listen.
If this was a short story, the deer’s death would symbolize the death of innocence. And in the same short story, the journey to my childhood home would symbolize a journey to the Self. But in this story which is not a short story, innocence committed suicide, and I went home to judge my mother. I thought I’d gone home to let something go, but when I couldn’t shake it off, I risked separation of blood and hair and flesh to kill it.
There’s a fundamental tragedy in the whole set-up: a deer has no business being on the freeway, but the freeway has no business cutting through a forest.
Children, perhaps even in the happiest of homes, play in the median strip between two lanes of traffic. Parents are careful and look straight ahead and try not to go off the road, but children are playing in the always dangerous middle. In a perfect world, children would play wherever they choose, moving toward whatever interests them, without worrying about the dangers around them. But it’s not usually set up that way.
It seems almost too simplistic to say that terrorism makes us feel unsafe, but it’s also just not quite right. It’s more the case that terrorism makes us realize that we feel unsafe. The feeling of being unsafe was there before the act of terrorism, and it remains, though dormant, when the act has faded into memory.
That feeling of being deeply unsafe, already firmly in place, is what makes terrorism work.
Do you actually remember September 11th, 2001? It sounds like a silly question given the magnitude of the day, but it’s fair. It’s important, in some obvious way, that we don’t forget the people who died, the devastation, the loss. But it’s also important for us to realize that for most of us, September 11th is now nothing but a memory. We remember the details because we think we should, but we forget the feeling of being unsafe, because we can.
The actual experience of terrorism for a huge majority of us is as something we see on TV, something we hear about on the radio and talk about with the people we know. Terrorism may touch us more deeply than Paris Hilton or Simon Cowell, but it does so from just as great a distance.
And still, it reminds us so effectively that we feel unsafe.
Three years later I settle into a chair for a relaxation exercise. I am to sink into the chair, releasing all of the tension in my body. Relaxing my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks, all the way to my toes. I am to let the chair support me completely—to receive as a gift, its full support. I’ve done the exercise before. As I release the tension in my body I realize that I always start on red alert, and if enough time passes, if my concentration doesn’t wander too far, I can sometimes relax down to yellow. I wonder if this has always been the case—if I was on red alert before the Department of Homeland Security named the experience for me.
I wonder sometimes, too, if the government’s terror alert scale is here to stay. And if it is, will we ever experience green alert?—“low risk of terrorist attacks.” And if we do, will we realize that the apparent unlikelihood of a terror we expect is terror enough?
Alice Miller writes that those who have suffered at the hands of their parents—those who did not have the benefit of enlightened witnesses—feel they must repeat what has been done to them on their own children. To do otherwise is to open oneself to realizations like, “My parents mistreated me, I’ve been lying to myself about my childhood, I’m damaged goods,” and even the unthinkable, “My parents didn’t love me.”
I was lucky. I might never have faced my own truth if a couple of 747s had not hit me 16 hours after Alice Miller did.
The cure for feeling unsafe may be as simple as admitting the truth, if only to ourselves. “I was beaten as a child.” “My country was attacked by terrorists.” “Certainly I had misbehaved, but children are innocent; I didn’t have it coming.” “Certainly we have misbehaved, and though we are far from innocent, we didn’t have it coming.” With one breath for clarity and another for courage, and a third to sink deeper into our chairs, we can be our own enlightened witnesses.
If no one else listens it doesn’t matter. The truth will set us free.
First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.
