Yep, we still have skyscrapers

  • Chicago from Lake MichiganOn Sat­ur­day, Greg and I were in Chicago to visit a god­daugh­ter, and we took a brief cruise that took us down the Chicago River and out into Lake Michi­gan. The tour guide mostly talked about … sky­scrap­ers. Because we were mostly look­ing at … skyscrapers.

    That was two days before today’s 9/11 anniver­sary, and yet I felt a lit­tle funny look­ing at all these soar­ing struc­tures. It’s hard not to be amazed every time you see what peo­ple can do with stone and steel, and yet it’s impos­si­ble not to feel a lit­tle anx­ious when you see them there. Almost — what? — pro­tec­tive? How strange is that? But it’s true. After 9/11, there seems like some­thing almost vul­ner­a­ble about see­ing some­thing so impos­ing, so dom­i­nat­ing and so clas­si­cally Amer­i­can as a sky­scape.

    That’s just a prim­i­tive sort of reflex­ive emo­tion, of course. What are the odds that any­thing would hap­pen right then while I was look­ing? But then, what were the odds that 9/11 could’ve hap­pened, if you had asked any­one before 9/11? It doesn’t mat­ter how many anniver­saries we have with how many well-spoken opin­ions and rem­i­nis­cences. For most of us, 9/11 is one of those things that will divide your life into before and after.

    I can’t watch a lot of the anniver­sary mate­r­ial. I don’t know which is worse — the times when the pro­duc­tions are so trite or maudlin or politically-spun that I can’t feel a thing, or the times when they’re so under­stated and evoca­tive that I can.

    I man­aged to watch the first part of “The Path to 9/11,” though part of me didn’t want to, and I’ll watch the sec­ond part — the 9/11 part — tonight. There seems like sense in that, as a five-year anniver­sary exer­cise. It’s worth tak­ing a seri­ous look at the mis­taken atti­tudes — com­pla­cency, denial, per­haps even a lit­tle of the arro­gance we’re so often accused of — and the other fac­tors — our own bureau­cracy, admin­is­tra­tive and intel­li­gence incom­petance — that we can change. There’s not much we can change of the Islam­o­fas­cists’ hatred of us. We can’t change that when they saw the World Trade Cen­ter full of inno­cent peo­ple they saw nei­ther inno­cence nor peo­ple. We can pro­tect build­ings bet­ter now. In fact, it seems more unlikely all the time that al Qaeda will ever get a blow like that again. But it did hap­pen, and if the oppor­tu­nity isn’t there, the mur­der­ous hatred still appears to be. That’s really what has the more last­ing effect, it seems.


    Related posts:

    1. Happy Mother’s Day with head noogies
    2. Howard lay­ing it down

    September 11th, 2006 | Grace | No Comments |

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