Day of Difficult Memories

September 11, a day of so many difficult memories:  most of our brains immediately go to 2001, that morning where we saw planes used as weapons of mass destruction.  Some of us might think further back, to 1973, where a coup displaced Allende, the elected leader of Chile and left an opening for the mass destruction of Pinochet.  This morning on my walk I thought about waking up on this day in 2017, packing our possessions back in our cars, leaving our friends' house and coming back to our house that had been ravaged by Hurricane Irma--that was the first September 11 that I woke up, and it was a few hours before I realized that it was September 11 and thought about past September 11ths.

I remember the afternoon of September 11, 2001.  I was crossing the campus of the University of Miami, the long hike to my parking space.  I saw two of my students, and I asked them how they were doing.  They thought we'd all go off to fight a war; I thought we would retaliate in some way, but I would not have anticipated such a long war, such entanglements.

I remember driving home and thinking that I was the grown up now.  I remember so many instances in my own undergraduate years when I was convinced that world events were about to overthrow my idyllic college years.  My professors must have looked at me the same way.

In hindsight, I underestimated what the impact of that day would be.  I would not have predicted the permanent changes in air travel.  I didn't anticipate how thoroughly immersed the U.S. would become in parts of the world that we didn't understand.  In the intervening years, I became enraged over the privacy violations enshrined in the Patriot Act--but I wouldn't have predicted how much of our data we'd freely give away to all the folks who control our technology.  In many ways, the U. S. Government having access to my library card records seems a much less scary prospect.

And here we are, negotiating with the Taliban as a way to exit Afghanistan.  That, too, I wouldn't have predicted.

As I think back over my political predictions, I'm chastened by what I've gotten wrong. I was certain that we wouldn't get through the Reagan administration without a nuclear war. When I parted from my college friends to go to my parents' house for the summer of 1986, I was convinced we wouldn't make it back--Reagan had just bombed Libya, and my parents lived in the suburbs of D.C., and I just knew something dreadful was in the works.

I do tend to expect despots to have more follow through than they often do. I do tend to be surprised at the power of common people to transform common elements like fertilizer or airline jets into agents of mass destruction.

Let us also remember the power of the common people to be a force for good, as we so often are, as we saw 15 years ago in the face of tragedy.