It has been three months since I have flown on United Airlines—it seems like yesterday that I was running for my connection in SFO—but today I took to the air again, flying from Los Angeles to Newark. In the dozen years since the 9/11 attacks, I have never had opportunity to travel on 9/11 and I was curious if the experience would be any different on this day.
It was not. And that is a good thing.
Same airport check-in at LAX with United agents not acknowledging me while using the kiosk to print my boarding pass. Same TSA barking orders about pulling laptops out of bags and throwing out water bottles for those without PreCheck. Same United Club staff who have trouble swiping my SAS Gold card to get me into the lounge. No added security at the gate or signs of nervousness from a full 757 flight. A small mechanical delay followed by a 1.5hr ATC delay due to poor weather in Newark. A so-so crew that was polite, but not overly friendly. A perfectly suitable dinner from a menu that has not changed since the merger. No special announcement, no moment of silence. One mechanic was wearing a 9/11 shirt issued by United in 2002, but that was it.
In short, it was a typical day of travel on United. That heartens me because it suggests we may finally be moving on from the mourning and instead looking forward, the topic of my 9/11 post two years ago.
As a war weary America breathes a collective sigh of relief that another Middle East conflict has been at least temporarily averted, we are faced with the question of how to properly reflect on the horror of the largest single attack on American history, yet move on with our lives…not to forget the memory of those who were lost but at the same time not to hand terrorists their primary objective, an infliction of sustained fear such that our way of life is forever disrupted.
The consequences of 9/11 are still brutally apparent, the blue-sleeved clerks administering airport security the biggest visible reminder, but America is moving in a different direction—we need not let this attack define us or control our actions. The politics of fear, I sense, is starting to lose its hold.
The second world war, in terms of casualties, was a 9/11 every few hours for six years, and if countries like the Soviet Union reacted proportionately to the way the US reacted to 9/11, it would take many times all of recorded human history before they managed to get over it. A single bomb, dropped by the US military, on an air raid shelter in Baghdad in 2003 killed a higher percentage of the Iraqi civilian population than the percentage of the US civilian population killed in the 9/11 attacks.
I do hope that your uniquely hypersensitive country is finally getting over the sort of trauma that is experienced routinely by many countries around the world (in some cases, inflicted directly by your country), but I’m not optimistic. And even if it does, it’s too late for me. I have successfully avoided setting foot in your country for several years now, and expect the streak to continue. The country which likes to call itself the “land of the free” (a phrase from a song written in 1814 – did all the slaves living in your country at the time give it a good rousing chorus?) has more closely resembled a giant prison for almost one third of my life. I never thought I’d find myself saying this, but in many ways, I feel more free when I visit China, than I do when I visit the US.
Maybe future generations will find a pleasant, freedom-loving country occupying the middle part of North America. I’ve written off the paranoid, hysterical, freedom-hating country now there as a lost cause.
AlexT’s comment is brutal, but he has a point. I think that our reaction to 911 was disproportionate and hobbled us. The original towers were put up in a few years while putting reflection pools into the holes took longer. They should have rebuilt the towers (with new technology) and preserved the skyline and then put a small memorial next to it. Hunt down and kill Bin Laden and his team. That’s all.
That said, I flew on one of the first flights after the original 9-11 crisis. I had booked them for a visit to my friends in Toronto. The plane was almost empty. There were no utensils of any kind, even plastic. The newspapers at LAX were all still from September 11. No catering had been allowed in, apparently. The flight crew appeared happy to be back in the air. It was a very quiet, solemn flight.