The Red, White and Blue

The Red, White and Blue

Another anniversary went by last week. An important one. Did you notice? Did you remember?

If not, how could you possibly forget?

The television stations were filled with the awful images most of the day Thursday. Some of the channels rebroadcast the actual pictures and accounts in real time, just as if it were happening right then. Minute by minute.

It was blood chilling.

The retrospectives started with short announcements of a possible accident that had occurred in lower Manhattan. The accounts were fragmentary, disjointed, confused. We didn't know what was happening. No one did early on. Then the pictures started coming in and the towers were shown, one of them with a black, smoking collision hole in its side, burning.

“Of course it was an accident,” most of us thought. A terrible, awful accident. A jet that had to have been very, very lost, very confused. Of course that was the problem.

Of course.

But the nagging thought that was trying its damnedest to surface in our minds was, “What if it wasn't an accident? What if it was something far worse?” We watched, the images on our television screens burning into our retinas, into our brains. Then, suddenly, like a sucker punch to the gut, we knew it wasn't an accident. When the unbelievable images of the second jet impacting the other tower, a lot of our national innocence was lost. In that split second of impact we all became, collectively, the walking wounded. We sat in front of our televisions and numbly watched the attacks play out. We saw the fireball at the Pentagon and then we heard the stories of the airliner that had smashed into a field in Pennsylvania, the one that was ostensibly targeting the White House or the Capitol building. The one, we later found out, with the heroes on board. We watched the horrifying pictures of the people dying in the towers – the ones leaping to their deaths and the ones burning alive.

We watched a war start.

Then, unbelievably, the towers fell and the monstrous roiling cloud of pulverized stone, steel, paper, wood and flesh came boiling down the canyons of lower Manhattan like a ravenous beast, devouring all that sat in front of it.

The survivors who came stumbling out of that swirling cloud looked like ghosts, their bodies covered with the white ash, their stumbling, wooden gait reminiscent of an army of the undead stumbling out of a black and white zombie movie.

On this anniversary, on this Patriot's Day, I watched our television. Not as much as I did on that terrible day not so long ago, but enough to reignite the memories. Seven years ago I could barely leave the area of the TV, even to eat, even to go to the bathroom. On this day I could carry on with my daily tasks. I could pursue normal activities. But I kept being drawn to the television accounts none the less. I was dragged into the pictures of the smoking towers, of the brave police and firemen rushing to the horror. Drawn like a moth to a flame. And the tears that came on that bleak day in the past were again present in my older eyes. My wife again looked wounded as she stared at the screen.

And I remembered, as most Americans can, where I was on that day:

I was out of work. I had been “downsized” from a job I'd held for over 19 years and had been out of work for about two months. I'd been actively searching for a new job during those 8 weeks of unemployment, traveling here and there, talking to people, visiting employment agencies. On this particular Tuesday morning I was on my way to an interview in Independence, Ohio - an eastern suburb of Cleveland. I was going to register with an new employment agency up there who, I hoped, would help me on my quest to acquire a new job. My wife was traveling along with me on that day to keep me company as she happened to be on vacation that week.

It was just another day.

We were listening to the Howard Stern Show on the radio while traveling up I-77 northbound when he suddenly started talking about an airliner crashing into the World Trade Center. He was carrying on about it and sounded concerned. But this was Howard Stern! I was sure what I was hearing was a “bit”, one of his notorious in-bad-taste jokes. Another example of Howard's twisted sense of humor. But the “bit” went on and on and, as he kept jabbering, I was starting to wonder, “Could this possibly be real?” I flipped the radio to another station and they were talking about the same thing. I tried another station. Same. Another. Same.

I felt a queasiness in the pit of my stomach. Something really weird was going on.

We arrived at the employment agency and I went inside to talk to one of the agents. I had a hard time finding anyone as most of the staff was gathered around a television set in a rear office. From where I was standing in the lobby I could see on the TV screen the burning tower I had just heard about on the radio. Finally one of the counselors came out, greeted me and we proceeded with an abbreviated interview. She got my resume and some quick statistics about me, but we mostly talked about what was happening in New York. Our eyes kept being drawn back to the television in the adjoining office. We finished our conversation quickly and she promised to contact me if any jobs were forthcoming. She returned to the group around the television and I rapidly returned to the car and my wife, who'd been listening to the radio while I was in the building.

The drive home seemed to take forever. Our eyes were on the road but our ears were on the radio, listening intently to one radio station and then another, listening to our lives being changed in many fundamental ways. Not long after leaving the employment office my wife pointed to an eastbound jet liner that was flying over the interstate we were traveling on. It was pretty low and she said to me that she thought she'd just seen the same jet going westbound just minutes before and it had turned around. Later on in the day we realized that what we had seen was United Flight 93 which was on its way to a fiery crash in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It gave us both shudders when we realized we had been, in a small way, naked-eyeball observers of a piece of the national tragedy that was unfolding, that we were that close to the evil that had taken over that sunny day in September.

So on this day in 2008, a day so bright and reminiscent of the day seven years ago, I watched the television retrospectives and revisited some of my own memories. I stepped out my front door and walked to the sidewalk. I looked up and down the street. I counted three American flags flying.

Mine was one of them. Mine flies all the time.

Where were the other flags? This was Patriot's Day, this was the anniversary of our national nightmare. It was nine-eleven, dammit. Where were the flags?

Where was the red, white and blue?

Back in 2001 and not long after the attack, the streets were full of American flags. The nation was a sea of red, white and blue. Rare was the house and rare was the business that didn't proudly display our flag. For a period of time we were all Americans – no political parties, no divisions, no dissension. All brothers facing the yet-to-be-named common enemy. Hell, even France's "Le Monde newspaper summed up the corresponding international mood of sympathy on that day's headline: "We Are All Americans" (Nous sommes tous Américains).

But that was then and this was now.

Now there was no smoke of agony staining the crystal blue skies over New York. Now there was no fiery, smoking hole in the side of the Pentagon and the debris and heat-scorched earth of the Pennsylvania field has been returned to normal.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so critical. Maybe it shouldn't bother me that very few people had taken the trouble to display their flags. Maybe I should have just ignored the ache in my belly when I saw the empty street - my street - with no flapping banners of red, white and blue.

But it did hurt. It did bother me.

I just hope it doesn't take another tragedy to draw my brothers together again, to set their faces in the direction of honor and patriotism and solidarity. To reject partisanship and divisiveness and regionalism and every other thing that draws us apart. To not be Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, African-Americans or any other word-hyphen-American.

To just be American.

To just fly the flag.

And to remember, at least for this day, what we all have lost.