Alarmist Clocks.

(This post originally appeared as a paper for my Sociology of Communication class at Albertus, which may explain its somewhat pedantic nature. It was graded in September 2015. Dr. Yeaman liked it. I hope you do too.)

It’s that time of year again. Every September for the past fourteen years, we are asked to remember the people killed on September 11, 2001. It seems there are (and seemingly always will be) a number of people, most of them white males, who want us to Never Forget, to Remember The Heroes, and to Hunt Terrorists. As someone who is often stuck in traffic next to their bumper-stickered monstrosities, I can only assume they mean this unironically. 

The biggest shift for me was actually across the week of the attacks. I was in class at a new job, and we’d decided to take a coffee/smoke break after some intense grilling about health insurance benefits. We had just heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, so someone wheeled a television into the back of the cafeteria. Over just a few minutes, hundreds of fellow Anthem employees suddenly massed in almost complete silence to watch the towers fall.

We were allowed to go home, if we so chose. I so chose, and immediately tried to reach friends who had jobs in or near the City. I’m thankful to report that none of them were lost that day…but parts of them were. Parts of all of us were vaporized, albeit less dramatically or fatally.

I woke up on September 12^th to a changed world. As a country, we had gone from having a sagging stock market to enduring a state of media siege that has yet to be matched. As a culture, we had gone from mildly sociopathic self-interest to utter xenophobic hysteria. People who would give their last dollar to a stranger wanted to boycott dollar stores. “Those people” weren’t born here, and they “spoke the same language as the terrorists.” These are the words of a close friend, since alienated by such thinking and my inability to accept it. Our friendship was deemed less important than my unwillingness to just sit back and let the hawks invade the rest of the world. 

Everybody wanted a war. A war on terror, a war on somebody, an expression of justice that would match the suffering of “our”thousands, all sounded like great ideas, made more appealing by the constant monotones of CNN and the adolescent jabbering of Fox News. Our home had been attacked. We had a moral obligation to attack the attackers, even if, to pick a few nits, they were actually already dead.
People greeted each other again, in ways that northeasterners would have normally deemed threatening…because people who weren’t Us had demonstrated such hatred. We were unified, with our manners intact and our shirts slightly less wrinkled, by the horrors of war.

I was stunned and appalled. I still am, to a large extent. Almost every lawmaker who could reach a microphone was singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA”, whether literally or figuratively, and we were all invited to sing along. We were to be a chorus, condemning “evil” (in the words of Toby Keith, a country singer who has not been reduced to poverty by this audio jingoism), extolling the virtues of being American. That in itself was enough of a virtue; the fact that we’d antagonized huge chunks of the world, actually trained and/or equipped some of our less savory overseas acquaintances, were still letting people starve while pornographifying capitalism and selling predatory loans, that wasn’t as important as a geographical accident of birth. Cracker Barrel, never ones to miss a beat, stopped playing Hank Williams and Patsy Cline just long enough to embrace Greenwood and Keith. I do not consider this a coincidence.
So the norms of all these behaviors, the bumper stickers, the endless stream of defensive rhetoric, the fondling of dollar bills while children go hungry, the unsubtle hints at American supremacy or the need for biblical justice (whether in the form of music or pseudojournalism), the war itself, are alleged to be patriotism. They claim to defend tradition, too, and of course, America as a sovereign notion, boundless and destined for glory.

I’m a patriot too, although my particular brand condemned me to be a very lonely one in those early days. I wanted to be sure people were safer in their thinking than to just run around, panicked and surprisingly capable. Until that day, I’d been fairly proletarian; I wanted to go on vacations, and pay off my house early, and maybe put a basketball hoop in the driveway. I wanted a nice hardwood floor, and a kitchen island for all those meals I’d cook if I only had a kitchen island. I wanted a new car, and to buy first printings when my favorite authors released new material. It wasn’t that I was unaware of the world, but my focus had been forcibly reduced to such a myopic degree that even Manhattan itself seemed so distant, so removed from my reality unless I sprung for train fare. If anything, the attacks reminded me that the planet is a sphere, and suffering is more universal than we’re encouraged to think. For a week, I looked to the sky in fear, certain that unseen hands would wipe away what little I’d accomplished. Now I look up because it’s the same sky, and we are all under it together.

List of Norms (with Values in Parentheses)

Other people put ignorant and aggressive stickers on their cars (patriotism/America/free speech)
Other people make Dead Terrorist jokes, or talk about foreigners being the problem
(patriotism/fear of the unknown)
Other people think that oil-bearing nations should be annexed
(greed)
Other people play patriotic songs as if that makes our country better than all the others
(patriotism)
Other people think that any nation that disagrees with America should be bombed
(patriotism/love of talk radio)
Other people think that an eye for an eye is the best way to practice international diplomacy
(patriotism)
I don’t do any of those things, especially those based on greed and talk radio, but I consider trying to live as an antithesis, if not anathema, is my duty as a global patriot. So we all really want to be the best Americans we can be; my notion of it just happens to involve the rest of the world.