There’s a story in numbers.
Take 9 and 11. Until Sept. 11, 2001, they were just two numbers, with no apparent intrinsic connection. Now, 20 years after terrorists attacked the United States by flying hijacked planes into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York, the two numbers are forever intertwined. Nine and 11 are always together, connected by a dash or a slash, uttered as one word that invokes the tragic images of one of America’s darkest days.
The terrorists killed about 2,750 people that day, in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, as the towers came crashing down and the planes fell from the sky.
It was a number large enough to send America to war for the next two decades.
In the past two years, the country has experienced a different kind of death toll caused by an unseen but even more deadly adversary. As of Thursday, have died of COVID-19 since the coronavirus pandemic began.
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Think for a moment about those two numbers.
2,750 vs. 650,000.
The smaller number was so devastating at the time that it united the nation against its new enemy.
The larger number continues to divide the country even as it climbs to incomprehensible heights.
Twenty years after 9/11, we seem to have lost the ability we had on that day to come together as a nation. I don’t know if that’s the result of a failed war in Afghanistan, or a failed attempt to stop a pandemic; or simply the sad reality of a time in which some Americans find themselves at the emergency room because they chose to take medicine intended for a horse rather than an FDA-approved life-saving vaccine.
But it’s where we are, like it or not.
Even after 653,000 deaths, we are bickering over masks, divided over vaccines, unable to see past the political labels that define our competing American tribes.
There’s also a story in memories.
During the pandemic, my sense of time, and ability to remember things, has waned for some reason. I often get confused about what day it is. I’ll start to tell a story about something that I think happened a year ago before my wife or kids correct me and explain that it was two years ago, or longer.
Still, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing in the moments after those airplanes hit those towers.
On that day, time moved in slow motion. I remember getting off a plane in Kansas City in the morning, feeling a rumbling that something was happening, but not sure what it was. All flights ended shortly after I landed. It wasn’t until I was on the bus to the rental car lot, where people were getting calls on their cellphones and relaying bits and pieces of what they were hearing, that the harsh reality started to come into focus. A tower was down. There was a terrorist attack. New York was in chaos.
For me, on the road, news trickled in slowly. I tried to call my wife to let her know I was on the way home, but phone lines were jammed. Motorists on Interstate 70 looked at each other and gave knowing nods, like we were all in this together, even though, at the time, we didn’t know what we were really into.
Time moved slowly, in part, because this was before the advent of social media. Lawmakers didn’t rush to Twitter to bash President George W. Bush, nor any of the presidents before him. Bush, himself, finished reading to children at a school before he dived headfirst into the moments that would define his presidency, for good and bad.
The good was that, for a time, he united a nation.
We were at war, or would be soon enough, and America’s political ethic at that time required us to cast aside political loyalties and back the commander in chief, to support the troops, to show the world that we could unite behind a cause.
Those days are gone.
Last month, President Joe Biden ended the war that Bush began, and the decision, like everything else these days, became a partisan political football. Immediately, every armchair quarterback with a Twitter feed weighed in. Too few of us took the time to lift each other up during a time in which American troops were put in harm’s way to evacuate thousands of fellow citizens and tens of thousands more Afghan refugees seeking to escape the Taliban.
Painful as it was, I miss the slower movement of time and news, those moments in which we contemplated our humanity and determined that we were stronger, we were better, as one nation united against a common enemy.
Today’s enemy isn’t a terrorist from a faraway land. The enemy isn’t the unseen virus that keeps mutating to extend the pandemic. The enemy is us. Our ability to come together as one people is imperiled.
That is the story of our nation’s dark day as we mark 20 years. The next chapter, the one with an uplifting ending, begs to be written.