A Blessing and a Curse

Seven years later, our distance from 9/11 – and one another.

By Rod Dreher, September 10, 2008

Let me tell you a story about another country, one that used to be my own – and, in a way, yours too.

I lived there on September 11, 2001, and in the days and weeks that followed. In this country, people didn’t hate each other for political or cultural reasons. People didn’t hate each other, period. Everyday spite seemed a luxury we couldn’t afford in New York City in those dark and anxious days. I remember standing shoulder to shoulder with all my Brooklyn neighbors on the Promenade, staring across the East River at the pyre, silent, grieving and praying.

We’d see each other at the local firehouse. We kept going back, all of us in our part of New York, to take food and donations to the guys there, who’d lost eight of their own when the towers came down. The things you’d see, and hear!

One evening there was a young man there with white gauze over his left eye, holding a pan of baked ziti in one hand, and his wife’s arm with the other. He told me he was temporarily blinded by the first tower collapse when powdered glass abraded his eyes. A stranger led him across the Brooklyn Bridge, back to his building, up his stairs and into his apartment before telling him goodbye. And he never found out the stranger’s name. Cooking food for the surviving firefighters down the street – that was his way of saying thanks.

Later, I met a guy at the firehouse – Engine 205 & Ladder 118, on Middagh Street – who’d driven in from Pennsylvania with his three young sons. The boys had read my column in the New York Post about this firehouse and its loss, and decided they wanted to give something to the firefighters. For ages, they’d been saving their coins in an empty water cooler jug; their dad told them when it got full, they could cash it in and he’d take them all to Disneyworld.

They were inches from the top on 9/11.

The boys gave every last penny to the firefighters of Middagh Street.

That was the kind of place we lived in then. Remember? Maybe poetic memory has enhanced the beauty of that time, but I recall thinking then how I’d never lived through this sort of thing. There was no such thing as irony, as sarcasm in public, no space for anger at each other. We were one. I’m a conservative, and a religious conservative, but when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson blamed lesbians and feminists and sundry cultural liberals for bringing the calamity upon us, I became unhinged with anger at their indecency.

These people they condemned were my neighbors. We had far more in common in our humanity and our American-ness than we had dividing us. They would have done anything for me then, had I needed it. And likewise from my side. A year earlier, I’d been fighting in print and online with the gay sex columnist Dan Savage, who lives in Seattle, over some nasty stunt he’d pulled attacking the conservative Christian politician Gary Bauer. But on September 12, he wrote me personally to ask if I was okay and to send his regards. I appreciated it. It was an act of generosity and even love. I would have done the same to him under similar circumstances.

Of course it couldn’t last. Many people hoped, and maybe even dreamed, that 9/11 would change everything. It didn’t. It couldn’t possibly have, people being what they are. A place of perfect love, and charity, and unity – that doesn’t exist this side of heaven. Still, it’s more than a little depressing to see how quickly we spoiled the goodwill and solidarity that emerged out of the ashes of September 11.

Why is it that bad times tend to bring out the best in people? Last week I spoke to my sister Ruthie down in south Louisiana. She and her family live next door to our parents in a rural community north of Baton Rouge. Hurricane Gustav beat the hell out of them, and like much of the region, they lived nearly nine days with no electricity. Eyeing Hurricane Ike’s projected path, and its possible track toward south Louisiana, I phoned Ruthie to ask her if they would consider evacuating to our place in Dallas.