Why I Didn't Care About 9/11

9/11 is something I revisit frequently because it's the biggest incident of personal apathy in my life. These experiences are frequent, often occuring during tragedy, but there's been no singular moment as big as that one, and no one where my having the wrong reaction was so obvious in the culture. In the years afterward, I wondered if I wasn't sociopathic, but since then I've had dozens if not hundreds of Americans express similar experiences. And so I'd like to revisit that morning with you today.

In my dorm, the girl across the hall was having a fit that morning. She threw a tantrum over something every morning. I'd woken to her tantrums more often than to my alarm clock.

“They blew up the subway!” I heard. I dismissed it. I showered and readied for class – it was my first day of classes at college.

As I pulled on a t-shirt, I checked CNN.com. It was down. That was a first. I didn’t know sites of that size could go down.

I stopped in the Commons building to check my mail.

There was one cable television on campus, stationed in the Commons building across from the mail room. On my way to check my mail, I found the halls clogged with people. I looked over a boy’s shoulder and watched the plane hit the second tower. It was probably a replay.

I couldn’t move. Not for terror or awe, but because that’s what I felt the room wanted. In social situations I’m keenly aware of what I think is acceptable in the group. In seconds I had all the news the TV had to share; people were dead, these buildings were going down. And I was ready to leave, but no one else was. I only knew that walking away would break an unspoken covenant with these stunned strangers. That was my strongest feeling.

“Bullshit,” I heard from my left. “Bullshit. This is why everyone hates America.”

It was the Eastern European accent of one of my few friends. He was a prickly personality. We’d met during a Shakespeare workshop. When I confessed to the work shoppers that I’d taken it because I found his works unbearably stilted and desired understanding, everyone but him stared. He laughed his ass off.

Now he was cursing his ass off in two languages. His face scoured all the silent Americans, seeking argument. Most eyes remained on the TV, but some shifted with indignation. It grew hotter without the temperature going up.

I touched his shoulder. He tensed as though to clock me, but I spoke before he could ball up a hand.

“Why don’t you tell me about this?” I asked. It was all tone; I don’t really know what I meant. I only knew that the attacks on TV were raw voyeurism, and that this was an act of violence I could actually prevent. My tone of voice engaged him enough to follow me into the mail room. There, he was completely unable to articulate what offended him. Something to do with our media and our excessive self-pity. After two minutes of spitting and spinning in place, he departed for class. So did I.

Since then I've thought that if I had been at the Twin Towers or the Pentagon, I would have been furious to help, to run into the buildings and grab someone. It was distance that made my attention useless. Here, I was a little useful. Both the desire to pretend to be solemn for strangers and to save my friend from a fistfight were uses for me. These items I felt things about; the towers meant nothing beyond their effects on people around me, who in turn needed things.

Our first day of classes wound up canceled. I sat in the classroom, greeting my fellow students and letting them know what had happened and where to go for more information. In half an hour, I went to the lawn for the dean’s little speech. I spent hours lending shoulders for people to cry on. I knew enough to get out of the way of kids whose relatives might actually be in those towers, and enough to check up that no more attacks had happened. Once it seemed certain that it had ended with the fourth plane, my mind actually shifted to thoughts that if I could write a book about this fast enough I might ride it to publication. I knew enough to chastise myself for the thought, even though I didn’t feel shame.

There was no fear for myself or country. I knew enough to go stolid when others came around, to mimic being affected, because that's what crowds wanted. I knew enough not to say a lot of things. I wondered if everyone around me was acting, or if the majority possessed empathy I lacked. Was I fundamentally broken? Or were they all going through imitation shock, out of the same social instinct that had kept me glued to the TV room?

Several anniversaries later, I’m still not comfortable with this feature about myself. I've been in this extremely pragmatic and dispassionate head space for break-ups, family tragedies and deaths. For literary rejections and my own body falling apart. In most instances I know enough to do well even when I don't feel empathy or emotional inspiration. 9/11 was simply the biggest example, because it's still this cultural crucible that's supposed to show the best and worst of humanity. I keep hearing it was supposed to.

John Wiswell Died on Easter

Easter is by far my least favorite holiday. Not for a gripe against Jesus, or about Christianity and Paganism, or that weak-willed whining of adults who as kids had the labor of twice a year dressing for church. It was on this holiday in 1981 that Dr. John Wiswell died, and that sort of a thing sticks with a John Wiswell.

I grew up hearing he was my guardian angel. I also grew up hearing he was an atheist. He was a sickly man who couldn’t get out of bed on his own, and he almost left my grandmother for another woman. They couldn’t have kids and adopted them to build a loving family, and he kept a harmful emotional distance from them. For most of my childhood he was a photo on my father’s desk that Dad wouldn’t talk about. My paternal grandfather managed to exist as a highly contradictory set of myths, myths that were retold and reappropriated every April.

All myths tied to the central Easter story. I spent most Easters at my grandmother’s; I’m told my birth saved her life, coming so shortly after the loss of her husband. That’s one of many things I heard from her, or my father on the drive to Maryland, or my mother on the drive back. That Easter story had a damnable habit of changing.

There’s a 1981 Easter dinner, my Mom and Dad sitting at John Wiswell’s dining table, John telling his son he wasn’t good enough for his wife. In some versions he was joking; years later, after my mother divorced him, more versions pitted John as serious. I remember one Easter Story where he was so excited over the prospect of a grandson, arguing over the best place for him to be born, though I also recall one about him spending that morning in the basement workshop, alone, refusing to tell anyone what he was doing. The most common is the 1981 Easter dinner where a family member came out as gay, and John was so visibly shaken that he went upstairs to lie down. In every version of the Easter story he went upstairs to lie down, and he never returned.

It was a heart attack that left my grandmother a widow for my entire lifetime. She’s looking at her 95^th birthday this summer. That’s one of the ways I mark my life: I’m the length of time that the sweet old lady has been without John Wiswell.

None of the John Wiswell Easters are necessarily true, but they combine to a very good primer on how people’s agendas define history. Even when I was too naïve to really doubt each contradictory tale, I understood they came because my father was particularly morose that weekend, or my grandmother felt particularly nostalgic, or from whatever was behind my aunt’s cloudy eyes. I appreciated and internalized all the myths.

Perhaps I internalized them too well. In recent years I’ve tended to fall very ill around Easter, and this mortality leads to inevitable morbidity. On a recent Easter, after having dinner with a wonderful lesbian couple, I actually had to excuse myself and go lie down. Staring at the plaster ceiling, uncertain if I could sit up, it was hard not to dwell on the myths of John Wiswell.

So around Easter I tend to fall ill, and I tend to grow grim. It’s not a gripe against Jesus, or my health, or even against any John Wiswell in particular. It is a long habit, no better than Samuel Clemens thinking he’d go out on the comet he rode in on. Actually, it’s worse – at least his was zany.

But contrary to a lot of secular thought, we don’t get to pick our myths. If this day means anything to you, then I wish your order of myths treats you well.