They Want Us to Listen

The souls who have been at rest here for centuries must have thought it strange on that shimmering mid-September day when the hot rush of wind and debris swept over them like someone shaking a heavy, dusty blanket overhead. Here, in the St. James Church cemetery close to the southern tip of Manhattan, where some of New York City’s first residents lay some 300 years after the soil here was opened-up to accept their lifeless bodies, near a church that survived The Great Fire of 1776 and has remained it’s worn, cobble stoned-self ever since, another rip in the land was created just eight short years ago. But I can’t help but wonder what the spirits that swirl around St. James think of what’s happened to the hallowed ground neighboring theirs – Ground Zero – and how long it’s taken to gently fill in the Earth, tenderly care for it and begin the process of remembrance, gratitude and grieving that seems to be slowly slipping away from our national consciousness except on a certain day in September.

The stones of St. James have been rinsed clean – as have the massive windows on the towering buildings that encircle Ground Zero – of the powdery remains of papers, office equipment, drywall, ceiling tiles, concrete, and yes, human beings, that blew through the canyon-like streets of the financial district like a nightmare made real on that crisp, sunny day. The graveyard has for years been in the shape that any cemetery in a big city should be: full of tourists with cameras, people on their lunch breaks sitting on benches, scores of flying rats and other assorted avian species that live for the metropolitan bustle, cigarette butts and worn grass between tombstones weathered, worn and giving way to gravity.

Not as much of this kind of progress can be seen just west of here. Where the World Trade Centers once loomed hugely above a city known for its ferocity and enormity, a city that calls itself the Capital of the World, the spot where backwards cave-dwelling assholes from one of the most remote, desolate and technologically deprived areas on the globe pulled off the greatest national tragedy we’ve ever seen, the only thing that is rising from the ashes and grief and horror are a few rusting I-beams near a couple cranes that slowly swing items back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Eight years.
2,920 days.
70,080 hours.
4,204,800 minutes.

One massive, gaping wound to our national conscience, our heart, indeed our very identity, that, as long as it is open, still seeps with the pestilence and depraved evil of that most evil of days.

This here, in the United States of America, where we pride ourselves on the ability to do whatever is within the realm of possibility – or even push past that if we can – what remains at the site where our worst fears became a reality is nothing more than a large pit, plain and simple. And it’s pathetic.

I remember the days and weeks after 9/11. With ease I can go back in time and conjure-up images of politicians and officials standing on piles of still-smoldering rubble holding bull horns and giving big, inspiring speeches that “this will never happen again.” I remember the tears and tortured faces, the screaming and the hugging, the running – terrified – down some alley or street. The mom or the wife or the child holding a worn picture up to a TV camera. “This is my son, my husband, my daddy. Help me find them.”

Americans. That’s all we were. No political affiliation. No Conservative vs. Liberal. No Hawk vs. Dove. No Big Government vs. Small Government. No Black, White, Red, Brown, Yellow. None of that. We are Americans, we said, and we put stickers in our car windows and on our bumpers saying as much. We flew flags out of the backs of our cars and off our front porches. We talked about things with our neighbors and the guy at the coffee shop and the drycleaners and the bank. The more we talked, the more connected we became. We wanted something to happen. We wanted revenge. We wanted to clean-off Old Glory and raise her up – way up – to the top of the flagpole. “You fucked with us, now prepare to be royally fucked with,” we thought, and it made us feel good to think that way.

And we imagined that maybe within just a few months after the workers were finished painstakingly combing through the soil at the site of not only New York’s tragedy, but our tragedy, once all the tiny bone fragments and company ID cards and family photos bordered by a broken picture frame were all recovered, the building would begin. “Build as soon as possible. Don’t wait.” I remember hearing that a lot. “You might have knocked them down, but we will build them right back up. Again and again. Another after another. Whatever it takes. And the faster we built it, the larger a middle finger it will be.”

Several ideas were thrown around. The Freedom Tower was one. It was to be a shiny, metallic structure 1,776 feet tall, soaring over the New York skyline. It was to nearly pierce the sky. It was to be undeniable. It was to be our Middle Finger. Our Fuck You. Our Kiss Our Red, White and Blue Ass.

A few rusted I-beams and a couple of cranes swinging items back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

“Everyone here is proud of what they’re doing. They want to put this building up and show the country and the world what we're doing,” reads a quote from a steelworker on wtcprogress.com, a Website set-up to show the public what’s being done at the site.

Work is currently ongoing on a September 11, 2001 National Memorial. Cascading water that runs down the sides of two gigantic pools where the towers once stood are to be a reminder of how they plummeted, almost elegantly, to the ground. It’s to be a place of solace and reflection, a place where we can collectively gather as Americans, and maybe try to recapture some of that solidarity that we shared in the weeks and months after 9/11, a feeling of collectivity that has been blown away just like the easterly wind blew away that cloud of debris and bones and evil in the hours after the planes hit the towers.

The re-building process has been mired in politics. It’s been slowed by the myriad groups that have a special connection to that horrific day and, therefore, want the site where their husband, daughter, son or comrade perished to look, smell and feel the way they want it to. It’s personal for us, but to them, I’m sure, it’s much more than that. 9/11 might have cut our heart, but it tore their soul out. I’m sure, for them, it was like having the whole nation watch your loved one die and see you tear out your hair with grief. I can’t imagine the pain they felt and continue to feel.

But I think we can learn a few things from the old New Yorkers in the graveyard at St. James Church. They know the healing power of time. They have seen the city swell with progress and build itself up into what very well might be the greatest city on Earth. They are calling to us now, their voices whirling through the busy streets, past the honking horns of taxi cabs and through the pharynx of pedestrians that trudge past each other on the sidewalks of the streets that border the gargantuan graveyard adjacent theirs, but one that hasn’t quite been given a proper burial. They’re telling us to close-up the wound, it’s been long enough. We know how to get on with things, they say, we know what it means to bury the past, we miss the cooling shadow of something that says America. We want to be blinded when the sun hits it just right. We want to rest in wonder of the city – the country – that we helped create and rest well we will when the towers that we thought were the pinnacle of progress are replaced with something even more spectacular, because that’s what we hoped this country would become: a place where once you reach the mountaintop, you find a taller peak just over the horizon, and you have to climb it. That’s what we want, and that’s what you want, too.