It is a cool, sunny morning. The table and the ground are damp with dew. The cats are sprawled in the sun on our bed. The chickens are quietly poking round in the compost. The world feels peaceful.
Twenty five years ago, I woke up to the announcement that a plane had just crashed into one of the Two Towers. “Weird,” I thought as I turned off the alarm, dressed, ate half of my breakfast, and climbed on my bike to ride to school. Once there, I stuck my head into a colleague’s room. He had the T.V. on. As we watched, the second plane crashed. “This is not good,” we observed, staying calm because there were students around. I spent the day in my classroom, tucked way in the back of the building, teaching. Others kept the T.V. on all day—I saw no reason. We will learn what we need to know when we get home, I thought. We need to stay calm here. Students talked before class, sharing their ideas, but we did our work. My house does not have a T.V. and this was before we spent days of our lives online. I never did see those overwhelming images over and over again. Maybe it gave me some needed distance in the days to come.
Corvallis responded to the threats of war in its usual fashion. The Veterans for Peace started their vigils in front of the courthouse. Professors on campus organized a series of Sunday night lectures where they talked about our foreign policy leading up to this, what was happening in the Middle East, and how we could respond. Information is power. We paced the rug at home, hoping for cooler heads to keep us out of full scale war. The night we began bombing Afghanistan, I went out to check on the chickens. Their small, fluffy bodies were warm and snug in the coop; their world was still. Half way around the planet, other lives—and coops—were being destroyed. Anger had prevailed.
Ten years later, I had brought my junior U.S. history class as far as 9-11 (we started with the labor movement in the early 20th century). It was an amazing class; there were students from every continent besides Antarctica. What did they remember of that day? They were five or six years old. Some classes and families watched the news non-stop. It was terrifying. Zion Lutheran sent home a letter telling parents, in no uncertain terms, to NOT turn on the news while their children were in the room. That child had no idea what had happened for months. Exchange students remembered feeling sympathy for the United States. The discussion went on all period. Everyone knew that the world changed that day and now, they knew what had lead up to it and where we chose to take it.
Six years ago, I started teaching remotely from the desk at home. Outside, the world were and unearthly greeny-grey with ashes falling from the sky. Inside, the classroom world was silent. As students wrote, there was no sound from them—no shuffling, coughing, giggling, tapping of keys—because they were all in their bedrooms miles apart. The silence is what I remember from those classroom days. The isolation. 9-11 and those huge fires are related, both by the impact they had on our collective memory, but also in the roots of anger and greed, in our failed human desire to control each other and the planet we live on.
Last night, I took Barbara Kingsolver’s collection of essays, Small Wonder, off of my shelf. She wrote the essays the year after 9-11 and they are full of that time. The anguish, the fear, the small hope that we might bring something good from this underlies all of her writing. In the face of the news today, the essays feel ….quaint. The violence, the hatred, the anger that we encounter every day is an order of magnitude worse that it was 25 years ago. The adults have left the building, as it were, and angry, fearful children are in charge.
Part of me would leave this essay there. But it is fig season. Like Kingsolver, I take faith in the natural world, in the small rituals of friends and family, in the turning seasons. Cedar Waxwings have just discovered our ripe fruit and their bodies are etched against the deep blue sky as they rise, and turn, and settle once again. Maybe we can learn to do the same.
