September
12th is Come Together Day. At least, I think it ought to be.
It was the day America came together to
grieve, to heal and to rebuild, and twenty-five years later, it is painfully
clear that we didn't stay together.
We have been ripped apart. Some of that was done to us. A lot of it, we have done to ourselves.
Let's think back to September 12th,
2001.
For one brief moment, race didn't seem to
matter. Gender didn't matter, politics didn't matter, red states and blue
states didn't matter.
We were Americans.
We had watched together as four airplanes
were hijacked and our ordinary Tuesday morning disappeared. Our routines were
altered by Islamic terrorism. Thousands of families suffered unimaginable loss,
and the rest of us lost something as well.
Our naïveté.
September 12th gave us an extraordinary
opportunity. History handed us a moment when we could have looked at one
another differently. We could have worked closer together. We could have healed
some old wounds instead of creating new ones.
We did not take advantage of it, and I
have been wondering why.
There is something else about September 11th
that separates it from so many tragedies that came before it.
We watched it happen.
Human beings have always experienced disasters, assassinations, wars, and atrocities. Television had already allowed us to witness some extraordinary moments as they happened. The Hindenburg burning to the ground, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, the Munich Olympics, the Challenger explosion, but September 11th was different.
Cameras
were everywhere.
Millions of us watched the second
airplane hit the South Tower in real time. Cameras captured people running
through lower Manhattan. They captured the towers falling. They captured
ordinary people staring upward at something none of us could comprehend.
Then, almost immediately afterward, technology
exploded.
Twenty-five years later, we don't
occasionally witness history through a camera. We personally live
through history.
Smartphones, ring cameras, dashboard
cameras, GoPros, police body cameras, security cameras, and livestreams.
Everything is recorded, everything is
uploaded and everything is replayed immediately.
Everything becomes somebody's content and
the change has been astonishing.
For most of my life, broadcasting something
live to millions of people required television cameras, trucks, satellites, producers,
and millions of dollars. Today a teenager sitting in a bedroom can broadcast to
the entire planet by touching a screen.
That is an incredible technological
achievement. I'm just not convinced it has made us better human beings.
Go to a concert and look around when the
favorite song starts. A thousand phones go into the air. You can’t see the
stage through the sea of screens.
Go to Times Square on New Year's Eve and
watch people staring at the ball dropping through their fucking cell
phones while the actual ball is dropping right in front of them.
They are not watching New Year's Eve. They
are recording themselves watching New Year's Eve. AT&T is standing between
them and their own life.
Maybe that is part of what happened to us
after September 12th.
We became better at recording one
another and worse at seeing one another.
We see every crime, every fight, every
hateful word, every jagoff losing his temper, every tragedy, every injustice,
and every human being at his absolute worst.
Then an algorithm delivers it to millions
of us before we have breakfast. Of course the world looks like it is falling
apart.
Our
grandparents were not handed a highlight reel of the worst behavior of several
billion human beings every morning, but we have it.
Somewhere along the way, instead of
bringing us together, witnessing everything started pulling us apart. We
stopped looking each other in the eye. We stopped talking to the stranger
sitting beside us. We stopped experiencing the concert, the ballgame, the
parade, the fireworks, Thanksgiving dinner.
Most of all, we stopped experiencing the
person standing right in front of us.
We became so busy documenting our lives
that sometimes I wonder whether we are actually living them.
Which brings me back to September 12th.
Twenty-five years ago today, we picked up
the pieces of September 11th and started moving forward. I spent much of those
first twenty-five years grieving what was lost on that Tuesday morning.
So I am making myself a promise for the
next twenty-five. God willing, when September 10th, 11th and 12th arrive in
2051 and America marks fifty years since 9/11, I would like to be able to say
this….
I spent the first twenty-five years
grieving what we lost, and I spent the second twenty-five working my fat ass
off trying to bring my little part of the world back together.
Nothing astonishing or spectacular. No major
Jumbo saves the world movement.
Here is where I start…
I am not apologizing for being a white man
with beautiful blue eyes, and I'm not asking anybody else to apologize for who
they are either. I do not give two shits if you are Black, gay, Jewish, Latino,
poor, rich, handicapped, ugly or sexy.
I do give a shit that you are here with
me. That we happen to occupy the same tiny piece of this planet at the same
moment in history. That we are breathing the same sweet and sometimes toxic air
and maybe that is enough.
I cannot put America back together and neither
can you, but I can take responsibility for the few feet of America surrounding
me.
I can hold the door open. I can say good
morning. I can listen to you. I can shake your hand. I can buy a stranger a cup of coffee,
and I can disagree without deciding you are an asshole.
The biggest thing…
I can put the goddamn phone in my pocket
and look you in the eye and when another human being crosses my path, I can try
to leave that person a little better than I found them.
Maybe coming together isn't one enormous
thing America has to figure out. Maybe it is a million small things we have to
start doing.
September 12th is Come Together
Day. We were given an opportunity twenty-five years ago. We just didn't hold onto it. I am not
interested in missing the next one.
Come together, Chalkheads.
Stop recording your life and start experiencing it.
Gusto and Astonishment…
