September 11, 2003
On the third commemoration of the 911 attack on the World Trade Center; I will join the rest of the nation in remembering...
911...I had been working for months as a campaign manager for Evergreen's City Council run in Flushing..on the Green Party line. Sept. 11 was Primary day. We were getting ready to go to the polls to vote and do some campaigning. I turned on the tv and saw the film of the plane hitting the World Trade Center. It was surreal. When it hit I didn't see it as hitting human lives but hitting a symbol. When they showed the second plane hitting it gradually became real. I thought about people I knew who worked there. I saw the smoke come out, and I saw it form a shape like they show us for Satan; and I had the sense of an old Middle Eastern god or demon with mans face, a beard and horns...my nephew Little Horse was watching it with me at some point.
I looked out the window and I saw Evergreen and I was yelling, "a second plane hit the world trade center" even though he didnt know the first one hit it. I was yelling it for him and for all the neighbors too. Eventually we saw the tower go down; the sudden black smoke turn the street to night; and then coughing people emerge, blackened.
Evergreen's mom arrived next, she was coming to help with the campaign but she arrived shook up cause she'd seen the smoke coming from the towers on the way over. When we told her what happened she started getting hysterical and saying "not again not again" Evergreen was asking "what do u mean again?" but she started crying. I told him, maybe "again" was the war that had made her family leave China for Taiwan back when she was young...
Like the rest of the world we were glued to the television; we also had WBAI 99.5 Pacifica radio on; because they have the only news that we trust. The station had recently moved into new quarters on Wall Street; and they immediately began to give ground zero reports.
Everyone knows what they saw on the tv and around the nation. I hope I dont offend anyone with what I saw and how I felt. 911 showed me a New York I did not recognize. In the first few weeks of coverage; I saw a New York that looked like something out of a Woody Allen movie...a New York that was bereft of people of color. The heroes the volunteers the families of the missing. Now, its true that the NY Fire Dept is 96% White... and NOT because people of color don't volunteer. But of the Blacks who made it into the department, I think they lost 2/3 of their numbers that day. But you would not know it from the coverage.
A Black MD and his friend; and EMT worker arrived on the scene almost immediately to volunteer their services. They were held at checkpoint after checkpoint, and repeatedly asked to provide identfication; although others were not put through this. Ten Native American's in Law Enforcement on the came to New York, at their own cost, to volunteer their services in the immediate aftermath; when there was still hope of finding survivors. They were put up at the American Indian Community House, and they went to ground zero day after day to volunteer and in the end I think after the 4th day maybe one was allowed to assist.
There were several members of the Green Party who did get to volunteer; one I remember the most is Gary; a very gentle man, who quietly told me of sifting every day through the rubble and alerting those in charge when he would find a leg or hand or other body part.
Chinatown, which is not many blocks from Ground Zero was under siege. Many streets were taped off with yellow tape like it was the scene of a crime. You could not drive in. Some streets you could not enter unless you had id to show you lived there. While tv focus was on the stores in the Wall Street area and their suffering; Chinatown was dying a slow death. Waiters who worked for 20 years had to stay home as restaurants had to scale back because customers could not reach them. An acrid burning smell and a white soot covered Chinatown. A favorite restaurant that usually was open until 4 am had to close at 9. The sweatshops that employ so many chinese people in New Yyork were not able to open.
At the end of the first week, I had to go to Ground Zero. Not from some morbid sense of having to view anything; but I felt I had to do a ceremony for those who made their transition in such a horrible way. As we walked through Chinatown to the Wall Street area; there was such a wailing and moaning that I asked those with me which direction it was coming from. All three said they didnt hear anything, though I could hear it clearly, like hundreds of moans in the wind.
I finally reached the destination and the the smoke and the huge spotlights in some places and darkness in others somehow made me think of Apocalypse now. Maybe it was because of all the miltary stationed around. They all looked like young boys. I talked to a few of them; and I was touched because I could feel their fear..a couple actually told me that they were afraid terrorists would return. And yet they stood there; far away from home, (I think the closest one was from upstate New York near my Onondaga relatives) ready to face whatever would come to pass.
We had the ceremony and I no longer heard the moaning. In the weeks to come, the rest of the world would hear it as the drums of war began to beat. Not against Saudi Arabia; where from whence the suicide mission came; those were our oil buddies...but the moaning would begin in various countries that had resources that were wanted by the USA.
One month after 911 we were participating in a silent vigil for peace in front of our local public library...to prevent..then stop..the war against Afghanistan. In the following weeks I shouted "No Blood For Oil" and as a New Yorker who still breathed the toxic air (which Christie Whitman told us was safe) I held up the sign, "Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War".
I watched American flags go up all over the city, on every house window store car train bus and bicycle. But there was something more than pride in being an American..there was an undercurrent that some how there were "real" Americans and others. In my primarily immigrant community of Flushing Queens; there was a sense that you had to prove you were American. People were afraid NOT to put up a flag. Queens, the borough that was proud being the most diverse; suddenly showed an ugly side. An old Indian man visiting his family for a week was attacked and beaten. There were several reports of Sikh's who were beaten because they also wear turbans like Muslims. Puerto Ricans were attacked in Manhattan; mistaken for Arabs. While riding the #7 train, I heard people told time and time again; "Go Back To Your Country!" over something as trivial as someone bumping another when the train swerved or if someone beat another to a seat. I confronted a White guy who was walking down Main Street systematically bumping into Asian women - hard.
At the hospital where Evergreen works, coworkers demanded to know why he wasnt wearing a flag. That night I gave him an American flag bandana that I had long before 911 (Natives like to wear the flag for some reason..). He wore it as a headband, and they still were not satisfied. Other hospitial workers would say "We need to nuke all of them!" and make other remarks when he would speak of a peaceful resolution. And of course there was the "if you dont like it here, go back where you came from!" although he never said he "did not like it here."
As Sept 11 rolled around a second and a third time...the US has killed many times the amount of people who died in the WTC. First in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. The US is running amok like a sniper, with the rest of the world ducking and dodging and wondering who will be next. It is not our job to police the world, at the cost of health care, education, housing, children and seniors at home. It is not our job to teach democracy when we have the highest lrate of incarcerated citizens in the world. (over 2 million). Tens of thousands of our little children have to be drugged on Ritilan to attend school. We are a nation addicted to prescription and recreational drugs. When our president gives orders to kill heads of state and their family members like a Mafia Don; rather than to provide a trial and jury...how are we qualified to teach others about justice and democracy?
Men and women who joined the National Guard for a stipend to add to their low paying regular jobs; have been in Iraq now for 6 months. They are being killed; and our president from the safety of the White House says, "Bring it on". We dont have enough young people to send to police the world, even though recruiters scavenge the Flushing streets like vultures, telling the youth, "you dont have to be a citizen to enlist"....
Send the fires and flames cause I know this is not the 911 talk people want to hear..but its my duty as a Wolf Clan Woman...
Day Starr
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