I was in Kyoto, Japan when America was attacked. It was dinnertime, and my friend and I had been invited to the home of the very traditional Japanese family that hosted him in college. By the time we got back and heard the news, the twin towers had already fallen.
Japanese TV periodically broken into prime time to flash news and images, but since little was known, there was little they could say to an audience on the other side of the world, and normal programming resumed. To this day, I've never seen footage of the people who hurled themselves in desperation from the upper floors. By the time I got stateside, they had stopped broadcasting them out of respect for the dead.
The next morning—still the evening of the 11th back home—I sat on a tatami mat soaking in shock and loss. I remember the incongruity more than anything; it was such a beautiful day. The sun was shining through the leaves of the ginkgo trees, which would soon take its color. The world was in limbo, frozen, but I was aware of everything more, as if it were all somehow more alive.
All flights to the US were grounded, and my buddy and I had a serious conversation over coffee about the very real possibility of me being stuck with him in his tiny studio apartment. He left for work, and I stared in silence at the walls of the oversized closet that was our living room, dining room, and shared bedroom. Continuing my vacation seemed in such poor taste. But there was no possibility of going home. There didn’t seem to be much point in staying put. So, while the rest of you were glued to real-life horror, I marveled at the beauty of the Gold Pavilion and meditated before the enormous Daibatsu Buddha of Todaiji Temple.
I did finally get home, of course. From my seat, I could see a total of five people on a plane that was supposed to seat 500. All of them were soldiers returning from US bases in Okinawa and elsewhere. It was like I had a military escort. Everywhere else, people were terrified of flying, but I had never felt so safe on an airplane.
We landed on a broken nation trying very hard to pretend it was whole. Everyone spoke casually but incessantly about news and events I had missed. It still feels as though the entire country attended a private funeral to which I had not been invited. There was something it was like to be here then, and I had not been a part of it.
That was never more apparent than a year and a half later, when, driving to work, I watched crowds on street corners enthusiastically waving flags and yellow ribbons in support of a war predicated entirely on a lie. We’d been wounded, and rather than reflecting on our role in the tragedy, we wanted to hurt someone. It didn't much matter who. I looked around and realized I had nothing in common with you all anymore. The country I grew up in was gone. We were just the fleas inhabiting its corpse.
Millions died in the ensuing catastrophes, hundreds of times the number that died that day in New York, including untold numbers of children—untold because the Pentagon gives its soldiers standing orders never to count the civilian dead so there's no record to be leaked to the press or revealed in a FOIA request. I try not to think about their tiny bodies, still and lifeless in the rubble, or how they died not knowing who killed them, or why, how they never saw the missile or the drone that fired it, let alone the soldier that pulled the trigger, thousands of miles away. I try not to think of the absurdity of being killed for the crime of standing too close to someone carrying a cell phone with a SIM card that had at some point been used to make a call to a number flagged in a database.
It seems to me those worried about “murderbots” have greatly missed the point. We already have them. They look just like people.
The effect of September 11th on our collective psyche is almost impossible to overstate. Our leaders, so-called, were shocked and embarrassed into a paranoid schizophrenia from which they are unlikely ever to awaken. The enemy was everywhere, everyone: from the innocents imprisoned in Guantanamo to the soldiers tortured at Abu Ghraib, to all of us. Obsessed with “security”—whose is open to debate—they set about rationally constructing their own Death Star, an unprecedented surveillance-and-strike apparatus that, as Edward Snowden put it, “could not be meaningfully resisted.” It is, as far as anyone knows, now complete. Those who warned us of it—Snowden, Daniel Hale, Julian Assange—are in exile or prison.
Ten years ago, halfway between then and now, American soldiers shot and killed Osama bin Laden, removing the last reason for us to be in a country we nevertheless occupied for another decade. We spent twenty years in Afghanistan. An entire generation was born who’ve never not known American occupation. And everything we “built” collapsed in less than 12 hours.
Bin Laden is dead. We killed him. And yet, somehow I can't shake the feeling he won.