After the attack I, as many Americans, was scared and confused about my own reaction to this terrible event. I gave to the Red Cross, I cried, and I wrote a poem. In about that order. The attack provoked a flood of creative energies, I've noticed. People needed to scream it out of their heads in some fashion, and the terabytes of bandwidth flooded with digital images, poems and prayers surprised me, though I was no exception. So www.h0ffm4n.net went live with this poem as it's front page. I will leave it on this machine, linked from the front page, as long as I can. Whether you like it or not, whether you think it's a good poem or not, is immaterial.
It is a way of saying to my fellow Americans, and to the entire world, do not forget.
Do not forgive.
Do not give in to fear, ever.
Do not get bored, or distracted, or become less attentive to the needs of your fellow man as the months and years pass. Americans forget their scandals quickly; many of us have the attention span of a gnat on crystal meth at the best of times. We can ill afford to let the pop-culture inertia which usually brings us to rest to allow us to make the mistake of lapsing back into complacency.
After the towers fell, I suppose we all were in shock, feeling directionless and sad, aside from those who were mobilized: the police, the firefighters, the armed forces. But something changed: the ruins were still smouldering a month later, and I realized I felt proud of my fellow Americans. We had not given into fear. We had not hidden in our basements. The country did not grind to a halt. I felt proud to be a human being. Suddenly this was a country where people were polite, civil, concerned - if only for a moment - about lives outside of their immediate circle of family and friends. People stopped for pedestrians. They held doors for each other. Americans, in short, acted like mature, responsible, sympathetic adults who were citizens of a country of which they felt proud. I doubt that this country has seen that kind of comunnual respect for fellow citizens since World War Two. And it is sad that it took such a horrific act to cause Americans to recall how lucky we all are to live here: sad that it usually takes such an act to remind us of how precious life is. So don't forget that either, as the trauma fades and the memories get overwritten with Jerry Springer and Howard Stern reruns.
Apathy and lack of empathy for each other is what allows zealots and criminals to transform living, breathing people into bloody numbers in a government report; the statistics of terror. The misuse of religion has been a tool to provide this apathy for far too long, against the explicit instructons of whatever flavor of the Almighty you believe in, Christians not less than Muslims - research the Crusades if you think I'm wrong. Or the Inquistion. Or Jerry Falwell blaming gays, lesbians, and liberals for the attack (oh, yes he did.) This puts him one step above Osama bin Laden, in my opinion, and I won't apologize for saying so.
I'm not down on religion, don't get me wrong. But don't use God, or Allah, or Shiva for that matter, to push your agenda. If the Almighty thinks I'm a sinner, he can judge me himself; he doesn't need your opinion.
I'm not going to say "love thy neighbor as thyself." I'm too cynical. But deep inside me, placed there by loving parents, is the belief that everyone starts out basically good, and deserves respect from their fellow man. This was reinforced by early teachers who taught me the principles upon which this country declared its seperation from England:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
No nobler definition of government was ever penned. So respect your neighbor, respect those rights until they give you a damn good reason not to.
Don't let all this seemingly wishy-washy verbiage from me fool you into thinking I'm a generally sensitive or emotional person. I'm not. In fact, I'm a real bastard, once you get to know me. And I am mad as hell. And I'm going to stay mad; though it would be easy to sink into a media stupor, to drown myself in the millions of distractions produced by capitalism every day. I'm going to stay mad so I remember what's important, until I no longer need to remain angry to realize it.
A war on terrorism is a good idea, but it won't wipe out terrorism, make no mistake. There will always be the possibility of attack, not matter how well Tom Ridge or his successors carry out the mission of homeland defense, because terrorists keep being made. We make them here, damn it; remember McVeigh? As long as people keep having babies, some of them will grow up to be crazy bastards. As long as there are crazy bastards, some of them will be terrorists. From the first time a covert attack was carried out on civilians, the possibility of terrorism has been there. So we can't stop it; but we can make it harder to successfully carry it out; we can make sure that terrorists- at home OR abroad- know that we will track them down and wipe they and their support structure out. But they're like roaches; there are always more. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
Stay angry, America. But stay proud, too. This is the land of the Free and the home of the Brave, the Great Experiment. Do not let it fail.
Here's another link to the poem.
Another poem written one year later, 9/11/02. Its tone is much less sure, as I think is the tone of the country.