a life alive

Dancing at a Funeral

I was 17 when it happened. It was 3rd period during physics class and I could see first tower burning from the corner of my eye.  No one said much about it, till we saw the second one starting to smoke. Then there was an announcement over the speakers about a possible terrorist attack.  We stopped class and went next door to the lab where there was a TV and we could turn on the news.  On TV was a tight shot of the two towers burning. Behind me through the window, a wider view of the same towers burning.

Then they started to fall.  I saw it first on TV, then I turned around and saw them shrink. Turned again to the TV, then back to the window, then back again.  What was on TV seemed like a scene from a disaster movie destroying downtown Manhattan.  But when I turned around the towers were really falling.  A few seconds later, the skyline had a gaping hole and smoke was rising around it.  Classmates were crying in disbelief and because some had parents who worked there.  School ended early, and as I took the bus back home, I called my mom asking if she was ok.  I knew my parents store was nowhere near the towers, but I still wanted to hear that things were ok.

For months after the attack, every time a plane flew overhead (and many did since I lived near JFK and my parents store was near LaGuardia airport) everyone would stop whatever they were doing and look up until the plane disappeared. Slowly things went back to normal but things would never be the same.  Names like Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden were forever etched in our psyche; our modern day Hitler or Mussolini. We would see clips of his threats and photos of a tall bearded man, with eyes that looked deceptively kind.  It haunted me since then for the last decade. I came of age with Osama’s looming threats in the back of my mind.

I personally don’t know anyone who was killed during 9/11, nor do I have any friends that have been killed overseas in Afghanistan or Iraq.  But in addition to grief and sadness 3,000 deaths caused to their friends and family, what 9/11 did was instill fear in everyone else, a fear that made us irrational.  We were so scared, we needed to point a finger at some one with one hand, and then pull the trigger with the other.  We had to invade somewhere, we had to blow up something.  We had to come up with a list of names, we had to have mugshots of faces that we can spit on.  We had to torture. We had to have revenge.

We were so scared that we didn’t get in a cab if the driver wore a turban.  We would get up if  they sat next to us on the subway, and we would search them every time they were in a security line. We were so scared, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.

Maybe if we weren’t so scared, we wouldn’t have leveraged all those mortgages while telling ourselves that houses were made out of gold. We wouldn’t have knowingly fooled ourselves to believing that one equation held the answer to stability and profits.  Maybe we wouldn’t have been so willing to look the other way.

I woke up yesterday morning around 4AM to go to the bathroom.  Before going back to sleep, I checked messages on my phone (don’t ask why, it’s a problem, I know) and I had message of people telling me Osama was dead. I ended up staying up till 6AM reading about what happened. I felt a sense of relief and even grinned when watching Obama’s speech telling us what happened. But when I heard about how people were celebrating in the streets, climbing up on trees, and cheering I had mixed reactions.

Because for the last 10 years since I witnessed the tower going down, I saw the same thing in the streets of Afghanistan while a burning American flag was held up overhead. I heard fierce chanting and read subtitles that said, “America is evil! All infidels must die!”  The very thing they were happy about made me scared.  When I read that some of the spontaneous gatherings on Sunday night devolved into what looked like college parties, where people just became drunk and rowdy chanting, “U.S.A!”, I wasn’t surprised. It only proved the immaturity of the whole situation.  Because really, we were celebrating the ending of a human life. We were happy about another person who had to die.

It’s situations like this where it’s hard for me to stand by my belief that every human life is sacred and that each person was created with divine purpose and aesthetic. Even a man like Osama.  Because once I say that truth doesn’t apply to a man like him, I’ve diluted its potency and loosened my grip when I really have to hold on to such truths.

Instead, I must concede to it, not because I prefer it, but because it’s the truth.  And although I know that Osama’s death was for the better, I can’t be happy about it.  Because once we start bending what we believe to be true to suits us and what we feel, people like Osama Bin Laden and his network of terror start to emerge.

So although I breathed a sigh of relief when I read his obituary, I’m glad I slept through the celebration of it.