The September 11 Lessons I’ve Learned

I was sitting in the airport in Austin, Texas, yesterday, waiting the last few minutes before my son  had to go through security and board a flight to Los Angeles.

“Might as well untie my shoes now,” he said.

He tugged on the laces and they came undone. He was 10 years old when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon happened. He was home, sick with a fever, and watched the coverage all day from his bed. It occurred to me that he’s lived half his life with 9/11 and the “War on Terror” as a backdrop. And I wondered at how it made him different than me.

“I don’t like this airport,” he had told me just a few moments earlier. “All the food places are on the other side of security.” He was right, there’s really no place to linger by the ticket counters. “I think they did it on purpose,” I said. I tried to paint a picture of the way it used to be, before the attacks, before our definitions  of freedom and security were shattered.  There was a time, I told him, when airport security wasn’t afraid of what we had in our shoes; when we could walk all the way to the gates and wave by the big windows as the planes pulled back before take off. It sounded cheesy, like some long-ago place. Sometimes it feels like that – long ago, back when.

I had a planned flight to New York that morning ten years ago, a business trip that I never made. I was on my way to the airport when I got the call from my newsroom: the network had cut into programming with live coverage. “It looks bad.” Everything changed that day.

Both my kids are seasoned travelers. They move through airport security with anticipated ease. No complaints, no bother, nothing different – it’s the way it has always been for them. The difference is that they don’t hop through the security hoops out of fear, they do it because to them it’s the way it’s done, period. For those of us from another time the fear is still palpable. There are people in the world who can and will go to great lengths to do something unspeakably terrible – we must be vigilant.

I watched my son as he inched along the snake-line, showed his boarding pass and I.D. to the man with the badge and looked him in the eyes, as is his custom. I went through a mental check list: he didn’t shave, his backpack is a little ripped, his tee shirt says something defiant. I was sure he’d be pegged for a pat-down.

When I was a kid people used to dress-up for travel and flight attendants were called stewardesses. It was a big deal. It all seems so innocent now, looking back at the way we used to go about our business.

September 11th was a watershed in that specific sense. That morning 10 years ago, driving to the airport, the idea of a line at the security gate was impossible – our world hadn’t changed, yet. We were in the midst of the shock. The waves of national rage and suspicion hadn’t hit us.

I watched my son grab two bins. He plopped his shoes in one, took his laptop out of his backpack and put it in the other, tossed the backpack in with the shoes and emptied his pockets. It was a fluid chain of movements; everyone else on the line did it as well. It’s become second-nature.

A couple of years ago I was at the Albuquerque airport, in line waiting to pass the security check. And older man,who apparently hadn’t flown since 9/11, was in front of me. “Why do we have to take our shoes off?” he asked. I told him about the shoe bomber and how now even the heels of our shoes are suspect. “I’m glad he didn’t hide the explosives in his skivvies,” he said.

They’ve got machines that see you in your skivvies now. I wonder if that old guy has been through them yet.

If we’ve learned anything since September 11th, it’s been to live with fear and suspicion, to make it normal.

We didn’t sit back. We did what anyone in similar circumstances would do – we swung with what we had. Ten years later, after the longest and costliest war in our history, we’ve yet to regain what we had. I think our mistake was in trying to go back there, to that peace and innocence.

The world changed that day, and those of us who remember a time before that are aware of how it affected us.

My son stepped through the metal detector, his carry-on things were waiting for him at the other end. He slipped his shoes on and went in search of food. And that was that. It wasn’t new to him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s the way it’s always been.

This Sunday there will be commemorative moments of silence for the victims of the attacks.  The human cost of that day and of the wars since are unfathomable.  When I hear our political bickering and witness our ethnocentric hate I know we’ve not yet healed. I think that has to do with everything else we lost that day. Our sense of security, our ideas about the larger evils in the world. I’ll be remembering those things on Sunday.

I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and texted my son who stood a few feet away, on the sterile side of the airport: let-me-know-when-you-get-there.

Follow victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda

[Photo by redjar]

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