My 9-11 Isn't Like Yours

Please indulge me.
My experience of Sept. 11th separates me from my fellows in America, and every 9-11 I want to talk about it.

I was in Naples Italy, vacationing with Dawn, when the planes hit. We toured Pompeii (couldn't get home, after all) while the ash fell on Manhattan. We made it to Paris and stayed with family friends of my father from WWII, while we waited for the flight ban to be lifted, and we attended bi-lingual services at Notre Dame, for all the losses in America, and all the stranded travelers in Paris, while the Mayor went on the radio hourly asking for citizens to call in to volunteer to take in these same travelers that had overwhelmed Paris's hotels.

We came home to zombie-followers of Bush, liberal friends all, who had seen 8(?) days of uncommercial, unplotted TV news, seen the attack played ad infinitum and the speeches of Junior and Rudy run on perpetual loops on TV.

We had seen the true reaction of the world, in Italy, France and England, among locals and immigrants like our taxi driver in Paris, a Muslim who refused to let us pay for our fare.'We're all Americans now.' The old crone from Greece, traveling to her brother's funeral, who patted my hand during the world-wide minute of silence while we were in the air from Rome to Paris, 'So sad. So sad.'  The French Antarctic explorers we stayed with, in their eighties now, who brought their 5-nation reunion to a halt as we entered, and raised their glasses to these two disheveled Americans, "We are all Americans." I damned near cry as I type this, remembering their unanimous pride in America.

But the thing that I remember most is the monument the Parisians have put up, on the far corner of the gardens of Les Invalides, to the victims of the series of bombings in Paris in the mid-90's, bombings most of us never heard about.
It is a fountain of a stylized, single person in a long coat, standing on a small rise. The person's backbone is absolutely straight, a rectangular bar than cannot be bent. The person holds something in the crook of its left arm. And that something explains the rise the statue stands on. Because that something is the person's head, eye-to-eye with the observer, open and unflinching. While the water of the fountain flows slowly out of the severed neck of the person, killed in a terrorist attack, and flows down the coat, the person continues to stand, unbowed, open-eyed, undaunted.

I needed that monument that day, to remind me that people before us have known how to survive, how to continue, how to deal.

And I recall it as a symbol of all the people I met in those two weeks when I couldn't return home, and it counters the hatred my government later ginned up against all those people for not doing what our president wanted in Iraq. It reminds me of the opportunity America and the rest of the world lost by having the government we had that day.

And until I die, I will never forget that, and I doubt I will ever forgive those bureaucrats, Republicans all, for throwing that opportunity away.