Honestly, I took History of Jazz because it was an easy A. In fact, the instructor knew this was why most kids took it; one of the reasons he didn’t take attendance and kept his tests relatively idiot proof. He wasn’t tenured yet and needed students to pass the class so he could keep his job.
Easy A classes are students dream, right up there with the “10 minute rule.” You know, that rule about how if an instructor doesn’t show up to the class after 10 minutes of its scheduled start time everyone can leave? Well, that was the case in my History of Jazz class the morning of September 11th, 2001, though no one in the class left.
That morning we stayed, trading patchwork pieces of news concerning the planes that had just crashed into the World Trade Towers. We knew we were witnessing a moment that would be with us for the rest of our lives, and in such moments it’s better to be with others than alone.
I remember some students were crying, worrying if loved ones were okay. Some were on their feet, urging the rest of us to get to the gas station before fuel prices went up because there was no way we weren’t going to war. Some were just scared that we’d get hit next, that any public institution could be struck, and that nothing was safe anymore.
When the professor finally made his way in, he solemnly told us that class was officially cancelled.
***
After class was cancelled, I didn’t go home to my apartment. I had to go someplace that had a television, and other people to remind me I wasn’t hallucinating the whole thing.
I showed up at the “team house”, a house near the college wherein five KSU players lived and all the good parties were typically hosted. By the time I arrived, half the team was already there.
We stood around watching the footage of the events get replayed over and over again. Watching fires and collapsing buildings, listening to the talking heads cover the events live across every major news channel. Though it was only hours after the event, speculation on who orchestrated the attack had already started churning with all fingers pointing towards someplace in the middle east.
“Bomb those mother fuckers.” One of the guys said. “Bomb the whole fucking lot of them. Nothing good ever comes out of that part of the world anyway. Shoulda bombed them all the first time we went to war there.”
All the other guys nodded their heads as if to say “amen.”
***
Unlike class, baseball practice was not cancelled.
The team hollowly went through the motions, our minds constantly wandering to the state of the world and what would happen next. By now, Groupthink was setting in, and with news about Islam tickling the ears of my teammates, the popular player opinion was that, “those rag-heads deserved to be blown up.
I didn’t believe what we were saying was useful to anyone. I kept thinking of how horrible today’s events were already and how more violence didn’t make sense.
I kept thinking of how America, which was becoming so polarized in its political practices, oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world, and utterly commercial, could actually use this as a wake up call. This could be a moment to step back, mourn, and come together more unified than before. This could actually be an opportunity to lead the world peacefully. America, ever the over comer, could rise form this like a phoenix and change the face of humanity with how it reacted.
When I expressed this sentiment to the rest of the team, they told me I sounded like I wanted the Trade Center to get attacked— that I should be ashamed, because the way I talked was probably the same way the terrorists talked.
***
At the end of practice the hitting coach, ever the speech-maker, pulled us together. He did it under the guise of letting use voice our feelings, like some impromptu group therapy session. When everyone finished expressing their anger the hitting coach asked if anyone else had anything to add. I stood up.
I wasn’t sure of what I was going to say, but I felt something inside me pushing me to speak. “Guys, I understand what happened is pretty terrible, and I’m upset too, but I hear a lot of talk about Islam this and Islam that and, honestly, I think lumping a whole group of people into a category and judging them is dangerous. I mean, we don’t even know if they’re the ones who did this. Frankly, I don’t think it’s good to get upset with anyone until we know what exactly is going on. In my psych class the professor said that anger is just a coping mech—”. That’s as far as I got.
The hitting coach had had his fill of me talking. His words interrupted mine, pressing me back into my seat at the end of the bench, filling up the vacuum with words about patriotism and how we’d get the bad guys.
***
In the coming months, American flags started showing up on cars. Toby Keith got real popular for his songs about what America was going to do to people who messed with it, and what made a real American
The sudden increase in patriotism startled me. Maybe because it seemed to come with a sense of “don’t mess with the US,” like the US was a sports team that was going to beat all the other teams that challenged it.
This form of patriotism didn’t feel like it was a remembrance of something tragic, or a hope for a brighter future. Instead, it felt like a focused, commercialized anger. It felt like hate speech made to sound politically correct.
Maybe it was because I was a baseball player and I was around the environment of competitiveness so frequently. Maybe it was because I always seemed to speak to the contrary commonly accepted “facts” surrounding the incidents of 911. Maybe it was because I didn’t like country music. Whatever it was, I didn’t think the rush to more violence was the answer, even though it was the answer we finally settled on as a country.
***
During the season, after the country officially went to war in Iraq, the team would sit in hotel lobbies watching footage of tanks and bombs and fires echo across cable news channels. Teammates would talk about how no one could stand up to us, how powerful our army was, and how it was only a matter of time before this war was over.
Then, after several minutes of uninterrupted, live from the filed horror, an advertisement for a new truck, or a pair of jeans would come on. The slogans of, “American made” and “American proud” blanketing the images. I’d get upset about that, and when my emotions showed, the team would get upset with me for being un-American.
After all, they deserved it. The people “over there” were evil-doers, democracy haters, freedom killers. They were barbarians and anarchists, spiteful of us because we didn’t cover our woman and worshiped a god of love.
I didn’t care what they thought though, not anymore. I believed the whole thing was wrong. We were all wrong now, I thought, on both sides; this war and this advertising and this flag waving and nobody really knowing why or who or what was just wrong. But I had no voice, not in a place where if you objected you were not American.
***
A few years later, while attending a service at my local church, a missionary who’d been working in Iraq during the war came to talk to us about his time volunteering in the hospitals there.
He told us many things not consistent with what I was hearing in the media, or even in my own social circles. He said that when the bombs of freedom dropped, the result was innocent people piled in heaps, dead and burned outside of hospitals that had run out of room. He said that when the bullets of democracy flew, the result was children being pumped full of shrapnel and left to bleed out on dusty streets because there was no way to help them. He said that as he vainly struggled to stem the flow of justice, the flow of injured and dying, that people would reach out to him with fingers blacked by with dry blood and ask, “why is your country doing this to us?”
What answer was he supposed to give them?
Was he to say, “don’t mess with the US?” Was he to tell them, “because nothing good ever comes out of this part of the world”? Was he to declare, “because this is what a real American does”? Was he supposed to look into the eyes of the innocent and destroyed and say, “you deserve this for what you did”?
***
As I finish writing these words, church bells are ringing in my small town to honor the memory of 911. My Facebook wall is covered with messages about remembering the day. My Twitter feed is full of calls to #neverforget.
When I look back at this event, I wonder what it is we will never forget? Will we never forget how we got even? How we got the bad guys? How we showed the world not to mess with us?
Or will we never forget that when ideas go to war, people are always the casualties? That violence doesn’t solve, it kills?
Will we remember that, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, “war is a poor chisel with which to sculpt a more peaceful tomorrow?”
I mourn for those who lost their lives and loved ones in the events of 911. I mourn for those who lost their lives and loves ones in the events that followed 911 as well. They should never be forgotten.
I pray we do not look back in anger at this event. I pray we do not run our finger across the scar and take comfort in knowing we justified spilt blood by spilling someone else’s. It is my hope that as we reflect on this event, we will learn, and find peace as well as strength. Strength to step back, mourn, and move forward more unified than ever before—not just as the people of this country, but as the people of this world.