NEW YORK--It is beautiful today. The sky is empty, the French blue of a trader's casual Friday shirt. Four hundred Quercus bicolor (swamp white oak trees) barely tremble in the rumoured breeze.
We move through the plaza with hundreds of others. Through the light burble of different tongues, around the footprints of absent towers. The memorial is finished now and the museum is open. We were in the neighborhood, as we usually are this time of year, attending the Tribeca Film Festival (established after Sept. 11, 2001, to create positive energy in the neighborhood). So we crossed the street and had a look.
Somewhere in this grove is a tree unike the others. It's not a swamp white oak, but a pear, the sort of tree that gets planted a lot in cities because it tends to grow straight up and doesn't begin to branch until it reaches a height of eight feet or so. It's the sort of tree you can look at every day without seeing, a close relative of the Bradford pear, the tree we're not supposed to plant anymore. It was the last living thing pulled out of the rubble at Ground Zero.
It was just barely alive. It was burned, its roots and branches snapped. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation took it in, cared for it as best it could. It was returned to this site in 2010. You can see the traumatic moment in the survivor tree's limbs, the demarcation between before and after--smooth limbs rising out of gnarled stumps.
We know this corner of Manahattan a little, though I didn't know any of the nearly 3,000 people whose names are etched into the bronze panels that enclose the reflecting pools that stand in the footprints of the twin towers. We did know people who lived yards away from the towers. We did know people who saw them come down. And we were traveling that morning, on a day when the sky was like this sky, and we saw it on a screen in a Toronto airport coffee shop and wondered what kind of movie we were watching.
We lashed out, because we were hurt and there were people in charge who were willing to direct our collective anger at a tinpot dictator they didn't like, to effect a regime change they probably genuinely thought would make the world a little more stable. They didn't mind allowing us to believe that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor of al-Qaida; they didn't see any reason to debunk the rumor that an Egyptian named Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five weeks before the attack.
It's a principle of folk logic that a negative proposition can't be proved. But the guy who was head of Czech intelligence at the time says there's no real evidence Atta was ever in Prague. And in 2006, President George W. Bush gave a speech in which he admitted "Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks."
Bush thought the invasion of Iraq was justified because Hussein "was a clear threat" that "posed a risk that the world could not afford to take." He thought Hussein had access to weapons of mass destruction, partly because Hussein was posturing like he had WMDs.
I don't know that the world is safer. Maybe it is--I know I think about certain things now that I never considered before 9/11. I know that I have to open my bag for inspection before entering a theater, that I'm very glad that I have a known traveler number that allows me to skip a lot of the airport security rigmarole. These days I habitually size up venues as potential soft targets. These days I always mark the nearest exit.
But the terrorists didn't win, and they won't. Most of us aren't that scared. Most of us manage to live more or less as we like, according to our means. Though it's difficult to see progress sometimes, most of us are less tribal than our grandparents were. Most of us don't feel odd in the presence of interracial or same-sex couples. Most of us understand how corrosive and destructive fear can be. Most of us try to be brave in little ways.
Some of the people in this crowd might be experiencing something sober and personal as they run their hands over the names of the dead, some might be susceptible to the eloquent emptiness of the space formerly occupied by the towers, but for most of us, this feels like a park. A pretty place in which to stroll or sit for a while before moving on to the next site. For most of us, it feels normal.
And shouldn't it? Our world is a graveyard; we walk over bones every day. For a while we honor our dead, then we move on. We were changed by what happened here. Maybe not all for the worse, though looking at the crowd, in their T-shirts and shorts with their selfie sticks and swagger, I can't help wonder at how incessant American obliviousness can be. In the days after 9/11 we felt taut and hollowed, but like we needed each other. Two days after 9/11, driving a rental car through Ohio under eerily empty skies listening to nothing but NPR, I told Karen it was all different, that it couldn't be ever be the same. And yet, 15 years later, it kind of is. What is the half-life of solemnity? Do they play kickball at Gettysburg? We were here weeks after it happened, we saw the twisted metal and remember the black stink. But even then we saw a lady approach a policeman on Church Street, point to the barricade and the ashes beyond and ask, with something between alarm and pique in her voice, "What happened here?"
Well, what has happened down here is the winds have changed. And we can no longer claim to be a country without ruins, we can no longer pretend to untouchability. Some true believers with God on their side took box cutters on board planes and flew them into buildings and murdered people. Most of those people died here.
This is where our lives broke into before and after. This is where our new world starts.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 04/26/2016