Memories of 9/11

Nom de guerre: Rivrdog: Feeling good about 9-11

Rivrdog is a retired Multnomah County (Oregon) Sheriff's Deputy. On 9/11, he was on duty in the Multnomah County Court House in Portland. Today, he recounted his memories of that day, and of the months to follow. He made a difference in his home town.

I wish I could say the same, but I can't. I woke to my clock radio talking about airplanes having crashed into the Twin Towers, first the one, then the other. As I lay there, stunned, wanting to believe that this was a latter-day Orsen Wells radio play, I felt unable to move.

After I heard that the towers had collapsed, I got up long enough to go to the phone and call my office. I said I would not be coming to work today. And then I went back to bed.

A while later, I got up and dressed. Then I sat in my chair and continued to listen to the radio.

Around noon, my daughter phoned me from her home in San Diego. We talked for a while, relishing the human contact. We couldn't reassure each other, because neither of us were yet able to develop any reassuring perspective on the event. Still, it was good to know that we were both still there, still caring, still a part of one another's fragile, necessary lives.

After we said goodbye, I continued to sit there in my lonely room, listening to the radio. I helped nobody, it never occurred to me to call any other members of my family, or my friends. I was not an American, nor did I make a difference.

I just . . . sat.

I sat until the sun went down. Then I turned on the lights, and sat some more. I wasn't in disbelief, only perhaps in mourning. Even that was a small part of it, because I wasn't yet ready to feel anything.

The next day I got up and went to work.

Nothing had been decided, at least by me. All I was doing was carrying on. I went to work, and did my job. It wasn't that I particularly cared about my job that day, it's just that this is what I do, and I did care that someone wouldn't be able to do their job if I didn't do my part.

I hope my reaction, or lack of reaction, wasn't typical. My job didn't seem to make much of a difference in the world, but it was all I had that I could do. Days later I realized that this was all I COULD do, so perhaps my day of stunned non-being will be overlooked by the world.

Recently we had a similar national shock, cause by a natural disaster. The effects were no less in terms of property damage and lives disrupted. We have yet to learn whether the loss of life is more, or less. But (at the risk of seeming to be callous and indifferent to the deaths of my fellow citizens), I was able to function on some level. I got up, I went to work, I did my job.

The difference isn't in the effect; the difference is in the cause.

Hurricane Katrina is responsible for the damage in the Gulf States. This wasn't caused by man's inhumanity to man. I can deal with natural disaster, at least in a small and insignificant sense.

What I can't deal with is the deliberate slaughter of 9/11.

What I can't deal with, what I can't comprehend, is how supposedly rational human beings can deliberately kill so many innocent fellow humans, and justify it by a differing theological or cultural set of priorities.

I know so many good, responsible, admirable people. They would not be capable of unilaterally causing such untold human suffering. They could not inflict such a slaughter of innocents.

How could anyone believe so whole-heartedly in God, that they could justify such a horrible, inhuman act as we experienced (however 'vicariously') on 9/11?

What are we do to with a segment of society which applauds such inhumanity? 9/11 wasn't a natural disaster, against which mankind still, after millenia of technological advance, we still have no defense.

Technology seems only to present new means and opportunities for slaughter. It doesn't protect us from the same disasters we have experienced since time began: comets half distroying the earth, volcanic eruptions, earthquake, fire, flood, blizzard.

What do we have to protect us from our fellow man? God may be the answer, but today it seems again that God, or the false promises of false prophets using God as an excuse, is as much our enemy as the winds and the tides.

But however clement the weather this day, we hold it as a day of national mourning. And we wait. We wait for the next inhumanity to be visited upon us. We hope it will not happen, and it appears that this anniversary of dreadful death has passed us by for this year.

We pray it will not happen again, but with little confidence.

For the horsemen of the Apocalypse have visited on this day, and there is little reason to expect that they will not visit again in future days.

All we have, all we can do, is to do our jobs.

Some are more important than others, some are more meaningful, some are more helpful to others.

For those who went out and did their jobs on 9/11, and in New Orleans, December 7, and all other days of disaster . . . I thank you.

Rivrdog, you're a good man. I thank you personally. I thank you for doing your job, when that is all you could do, and I especially thank you for doing your job when you did more than was expected of you.

This is the kind of man who holds the torch of civilization, when those around him can do nothing more than sit, and listen, and watch.