In 2001 I caught a local bus at an insanely early hour every work day, the first step in a commute from Utah County to downtown Salt Lake City, where I worked as a freelance researcher in the Church History Library. It was still dark when I transferred from the Orem bus to the Salt Lake Express, one of the last to board before the bus made its non-stop way to Salt Lake.
This was pre-wifi. Some people carried cell phones, but nobody was lost in the screens of iPhones or iPads. Most people slept, with a few reading books and even fewer watching the sun come up.
It was light, but barely, by the time I got to the Church Office Building that morning in September, and I went downstairs to the cafeteria for breakfast. Some cashiers were talking about what I now know to have happened in New York and Washington while I was lost in the oblivion of my commute. Those then-incoherent remarks, together with a few just as incomprehensible stray remarks from missionaries in the Library, were all I knew of 9/11 until the announcement was made that Church offices would close at noon “out of respect for the lives lost on the East Coast,” or something very like those words.
I wasn’t very happy about the closure. I had made the effort to get to Salt Lake City and I needed to work. Besides, the bus back to Orem – the only way I had to get home – didn’t run except during commuting hours. I had to wait for nearly five hours, sitting on concrete planters on the office plaza, because everything was closed and there was nowhere to go. I couldn’t even be sure the bus would run as scheduled – I had no cell phone, and no access to payphones (all the buildings were locked), and of course there was no way to look up the bus company online to read any announcement.
Mostly I was ticked off because I didn’t see why Salt Lake City had to come to a screeching halt because something had happened in New York (I’m not sure when I heard that Washington and Pennsylvania were also involved). We couldn’t fix what was going on elsewhere, and it seemed to me that “keeping on keeping on” was the best thing anyone could do, if they weren’t in a position to offer more direct help.
I didn’t see any pictures of the attacks until I got home, about 12 hours after they had occurred. I hadn’t seen anything happen live; by the time I heard much, the utter chaos with the fear that something else could happen at any moment had largely passed, although of course there was still a universe of unknowables.
I’ve never quite felt as involved in 9/11 as most people seem to be, not only because I didn’t know anyone directly involved, but mostly because I passed through those first hours in a cocoon of uninformed isolation. I understood better what had brought the world to a standstill, even as I remained – and remain – somewhat detached from the immediate emotions.
-ooOoo-
This is the point where I’m going to lose the sympathy of a lot of readers.
I don’t think that distance or even a mild detachment from overwhelming tragedy is necessarily a bad thing. I think that “keeping on keeping on” is very often the right thing, even in the face of disaster – and that’s true in the case of individual lives as well as wholesale tragedy.
If you are in the position of a first responder, whether a fireman in Manhattan, or the old man with a shovel and a basket who is first on the scene of an earthquake-crumpled building in Italy, you have the opportunity and duty to jump in feet first to save life. The fishermen on Lesbos who first began pulling refugees from the sea, the parent or spouse who first becomes aware of a loved-one’s waning faith, has a unique responsibility that cannot be passed off to anyone else.
There are people who, although not first on the scene, are also uniquely positioned to help in a crisis. These might be all those boaters, whether commercial ferrymen or fishermen or private yatchsmen, who spontaneously converged on Manhattan to carry stranded businessmen and tourists off the island after the bridges were closed. These are NGO’s and private persons who rushed to Greece to help receive refuges, and who organized efforts to collect and ship critical goods to the scene. These might be ward members or extended family who stand ready to help when an opportunity offers, even when it is as simple as a smile and patting the seat next to you to welcome a newly “out” member back to Sunday School.
It might be making sandwiches to feed emergency workers, or donating to that Scout project to buy and ship wheelchairs to some point where they’re needed, or donating blood, or assembling hygiene kits, or participating in that after-school tutoring program, or responding without hostility when your commitment to faith is challenged.
But for most of us, “keeping on keeping on” is the greatest contribution we can make. We’re not on the spot. We’ve made whatever donations we can make. We’re willing to help, but know of no ongoing role where we are especially wanted or needed. We’re ready and willing, but not called upon, for the moment.
You probably don’t feel very heroic when you continue to do what you’ve always done to pay the bills and visit the sisters you’ve been asked to teach or take tickets at the door to the high school play, especially when you see so many more dramatic or glamorous contributions praised and televised. But even – maybe especially – when there is a spectacle to watch but to which you can make no direct contribution, keeping the dishes washed and the checkout line moving and the buses on schedule and the Primary kids singing and the prayers ascending is all we can do – is what we should do – is as noble as anything that can be done.
Keep on keeping on.
Amen! Thank you. I have felt the same way. Tragedies happen but we need to move on, make the world around us a better place and celebrate the good we see today.
Thanks Ardis, this is a good advice.
Hear, hear. Thanks for writing this, so true to consider.
I was watching live TV when the second plane hit, getting ready for my second day of work at a new job. I went to work, and even though it was a tough day, I felt better trying to do something normal, rather than just sitting at home watching the depressing replays and commentary that we got so much of over the next few weeks. Keeping on and trying to promote some sense of normal turned out to be helpful in the long run for me.
Ralph returned from the seminary run and got our TV out of the high closet in the garage and turned it on. Ralph was predicting that the towers would fall, and they did, at right about the time he predicted. It was a very strange day.
Having said that, I admit that I tend to emotionally distance myself from crises and suffering for which I can do nothing. I find that necessary to have the emotional strength to deal with the human suffering that although on a smaller scale, happens right in front of me, which the Lord expects me to do something about. That takes most of my emotional energy. If something comes up that I can do for people suffering in distant places, I try to do it, but I try not to use my emotional energy on situations I can’t do anything about.
For better or worse, that’s what I do.
During the weeks before 9-11, I had been struggling greatly with depression and loss of hope as we had been enduring many years of infertility and had been waiting quite some time to adopt a baby. I had been at a very low point. I believe it was the day before the tragedy, I had received a priesthood blessing and was *finally* feeling peace and optimism. I was annoyed at the idea of being expected to break that newfound feeling of hope and light and turn back to mourning and darkness. For this reason, I remember keeping myself emotionally distanced from everything as well, though I was glued to the TV and attended community memorials and all of that just like everyone else did.
I think living in a place far-removed from 9-11 helped to facilitate this. I lived in Utah at the time. Now I live in Pennsylvania, only 4 hours from New York and 4 hours from Washington.
Thanks for the message. Yes, keeping on keeping on is important — it’s what we do. And I think it helps the healing process. It is sad when someone with a cause to mourn wants the entire world to stop because of his or her tragedy. Maybe life is like a freeway — we want to be in the fast lanes as a general matter, but we all have occasions when we must move to a slower lane — and we sometimes choose to move to a slower lane as a matter of patience. If I speed by you when you’re pulled over, it might be because I’m rushing to an emergency of my own.
Love this. Thank you for sharing Ardis.
I was at my office at Sandia National Laboratories when an email came around telling us that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center. I think we all immediately thought “terrorist attack”, in part because it’s something our group had already begun studying and half of us half expected that a terrorist group would set off an improvised nuclear weapon under the towers someday.
When we heard that the second tower had been hit, we knew for sure.
Shortly after the first tower collapsed, we got an email from management telling us all that the lab was closing for our own safety (SNL is located on Kirtland Air Force Base) and we were to head home. To avoid traffic congestion, we were to depart on a staggered schedule by division. My division was last. I guess that told us where we stood in the eyes of management! (I know. Someone had to be last.)
We remained closed for three days. When we finally went back, there was a set of concrete dolphins and an armored car guarding the entrance gate. My car got thoroughly searched by very polite but very heavily armed airwomen before I was let through. (This was not routine.)
I thought at the time that we ought to have stayed at our posts. Even us civilians.
My sister called from Washington, DC to say that she was fine, that she was in leased space in an unmarked building, so not a target, but that the people in her office had moved down a couple of floors because it seemed safer. She wasn’t going home, because the Metro was already a snarled mess and she wanted to give it time to clear out. Instead, she spent the day with the staff of the Dept. of Justice office of victim assistance brainstorming what they might do to assist victims.
Several weeks later, she was driving to some evening event with a friend. As they crossed the Potomac, the friend heaved a great sigh and said, “This is the first time I’ve been in the District since the Pentagon was hit.” My sister looked in silence and then said, “You do remember that the Pentagon is in Virginia, where we live, right?
One of my sisters called us from Utah (I was living in Maryland at the time) to tell us to turn the news on; we saw the second plane hit.
We had a stake conference session scheduled for that evening. I had every intention of going, but by about five o’clock, they had cancelled it. I had to concede that, since the original plan had been to hold the meeting in the assembly room in the D.C. temple, perhaps there was some wisdom in cancelling that one.
Both my youngest sister and I had the same reaction when we first heard about terrorism as a concept: why hasn’t anything worse happened to us yet? So when 9/11 happened, we both sort of felt like the thing we had been half-expecting had finally happened. I have gone through phases where I felt guilty about not feeling extra bad about 9/11, but I have finally come to the conclusion that if I am willing to mourn with those that mourn within my own path, and support political ideas which I feel will reduce the Problem of Terrorism, I have done my part.
I have to admit, though, when I was driving to church on Sunday (I live in Maryland again), and I saw flags attached to the overpasses like they had been for MONTHS after 9/11 (could have even been years– I don’t remember for sure now), my heart swelled with gratitude as I remembered that spirit of prayerfulness and of willingness to seriously consider problems like terrorism which sprang up at that time. I feel the tenor of the national conversation now is very much back to “nothing bad could ever happen to us, not really, so we are going to run around calling our political enemies mean names instead of addressing any real issues” which very much makes me crazy. I may not have any particular extra sympathy for the deaths of the 9/11 victims, but if we refuse to learn anything from what happened, if we continue in a path which will lead to more tragedy, we are disrespecting them in a most profound way, which indeed makes me not only crazy but angry.
And I want to end on a positive note, so I will say this: I feel like Middle Eastern refugees are our greatest hope in the fight against terror. I can’t say I am such a scholar of history, but in my reading of the Book of Mormon, and in my understanding of WWII and King Phillip’s war and the Civil War in this country, no great war was ever won without significant help from “the enemy,” or rather defectors from them. The penchant of my fellow Americans for vilifying such refugees is another thing which makes me very crazy, but since I’m being so positive I’ll just say I feel great hope when I think about even the very few we have let in, and when I think about how hard many people are working to UN-villify them.
I was 12 and getting ready for school. My mom babysat a neighborhood toddler during the workday, and it was the toddler’s mother who told us about the attack. My mom yelled across the house for me to turn the TV on, but I couldn’t find the remote and started out to grab the morning paper. “It’s happening RIGHT NOW,” mom shouted. I found the remote.
I watched the towers collapse before leaving to walk to school, around 1/2 mile away. During school we watched the TVs for the first few periods, but administration told the teachers to turn them off. In PE, it was all we could talk about. I specifically remember one kid commenting that it reminded him of something in a movie — he was killed in Iraq in 2009.
That afternoon, my mom took my best friend and me to our community center improv class. We weren’t sure if classes were still going on, but we didn’t know the number to call, so we went anyway. We bought Sonic shakes on the way. It was my friend’s parents’ turn to drive, but her dad was City Manager of our suburb, and he had to work late for obvious reasons. I remember how nervous my mom was to leave her child alone in a public space on that day.
Class went on as scheduled.