Indivisible

By twelve, a lot of kids have been through things they shouldn't in an ideal world, have to go through, have already had those formative moments of innocence-stripping done to them. That wasn't the case for me. At 12, I was still very much a kid. Until I wasn’t.

.

The year was 2001, and I was in the seventh grade. The year had just started, and I was crossing the hall to my third-period math class. Middle school was old hat to me now- I knew, if not how to thrive, all the places to hide, the frequency at which to pitch myself to slide under everyone's radar. I entered the classroom, slipping to the back like always, but something was off. Up front, the TV was turned to the news, and half of the class, the teacher included, was still standing, eyes zooming around between one another, a low murmur of conversation happening. Most people were fixated on the screen, where all I could see was a city skyline, and smoke.

We never had that math class. The next thing I remember, I was waiting for my mom to come pick me up. Her car sped to a stop in front of me, and I got in to see my younger brother had already been scooped from his respective school. I don't remember the talk in the car, only that there was little of it: the words planes, two towers, terrorists.

It was that last word that gripped me most when I sat in bed that night, watching the light from the fish tank between my sisters' and my bed glow ripples on the wall. Terrorist. A hard, sharp-edged word, a word with teeth. Somewhere out there, in the silent night at my back, there were people who wanted me dead. Not me, really, but America, which to them was me, was the whole faceless mass of us. It wasn't personal, and somehow that made it more frightening.

America, to a privileged child living within its borders, is the world. When I thought of places far away, I thought of California where my aunt AB and Uncle Pete lived. I'd never visited and I didn't imagine at the the time I ever would- we weren't close to them, and the rest of my family lived comfortably in New England. The other side of the country might as well be the other side of the world for me, with how inaccessible and far away it seemed. I knew, of course, that other countries existed, but to me they might as well be other worlds. This wasn't helped by terms like 'third-world country' which to a kid evokes a literal different map, like the one of Middle Earth in my Lord of the Rings novels.

Over the next weeks, I would learn that people I knew knew people who’d died- adults who'd gone to work at the World Trade Center and had never come home. I tried to picture living in New York, my father gone at work, and calling his phone over and over with no reply, smoke furling from the horizon out my window. The reality was so far and yet so close. I lived just over in Connecticut. I tried to imagine my parents gone, taken for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or vice versa. My mind was blank; full of nothing, like when you try to picture your own non-existence. For those children, the towers were a lightning strike that ended their illusion of safety- for me and most other kids around me, it was more the rumblings of thunder, coming close on the bloody heels of puberty, trailing the disaster of Columbine by a couple of years.

America was a lot of things in my mind, but we'd never been the victim. We were too fortunate, too privileged. All my life I'd been told we were lucky. America was the place to live. I'd won the lottery, somehow, just by virtue of my birth. Some of the folk tales I'd grown up with about America's beginning would lead me to believe others wanted to be us, or looked up to us. But wanted to hurt us? Was it because of the privilege we had? I became darkly aware that I only had one side of the story. Did we maybe deserve some of that hate? Whether I wanted to be or not, I was also America, and my lack of knowledge seemed a condemnation all its own, a proof-in-the-pudding stereotype.

The direct results of 9/11 in my life were noticeable, if minimal on a personal level. Everyone wanted to come together to help those who were hurt, everyone wanted to keep something like this from ever happening again. We had moments of silence for the victims in school. For years, the eighth grade take a trip to Washington DC as an annual tradition. That year there was no trip, and the year after that, my year, we went to Boston instead. There was increased security everywhere, but especially in airports. September 11th was probably the first event in my young life to really tear me from the self-centric world children tend to inhabit. I found myself thinking about things I’d never considered before, things I’d taken for granted. My own personal safety was only one of those things.

I as a child had already begun to feel a distaste for religion (I would part ways with my own Catholic upbringing only a few years later) and the idea that any religion considered it okay for its own members to self-destruct, that such killing of innocent civilians was somehow honorable in any world, made me all the more convinced it was all manmade bullshit. How were these zealous suicide pilots any different from the boys who'd donned trenchcoats a couple of years prior and walked into the school, killing fifteen before turning the guns on themselves? It seemed to me that government and religion were a lethal mix, and I felt relieved that in the U.S., church and state were separate. For all people in my country wanted to make a boogeyman of Islam, I saw no reason to believe Christianity would be any less destructive if given that level of agency. In fact, our earliest history only seemed to reinforce this idea. Ideology was dangerous in all its iterations.

One of those ideologies was the extreme nationalist tendencies our government at times fostered. 9/11 made me critical of things I'd never given much thought before, like our involvement in foreign affairs and the true intentions of our politicians. I viewed not only the rest of the world, the 'others' with more suspicion, but began to apply it to our elders and leaders as well. Everyone had an agenda, and it was rarely to never pure. It was around this time that I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in class, though I never connected it specifically to this day.

I would not have put it this way then, but I think the events of September 11th and- maybe especially- the reaction of the country around me in the aftershock- was my first conscious experience of national identity. The not at all unique mixed feelings of love and pride in my country as well as disillusionment and shame. Like family, nationality was something I didn’t choose, and like family it had shaped me incontestably and would continue to do so.

And it must be said- like my own imperfect human family, I am lucky to say America is something I would choose if I could. For all the increasing criticism I would come to have for it, the freedom to express this criticism is something I would equally grow to appreciate, and this freedom is not nearly as common the world over as it should be.