The visitors and victims were all colors and backgrounds. My heart swelled with pride and I thought: Thank you, America, for doing such a good job.
Over the winter holidays, my family and I visited the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan. Though it had opened in 2014, and we live in nearby New Jersey, I’d never had much interest in going. After all, what else was there to learn? The attacks were documented as they happened: Like millions of others, I watched the towers come down in real time on TV; videos of the event are all over the web; books recount both the moment-by-moment drama of the tragedy as well the ancient historical forces that led to it.
But the museum is powerfully stunning: It does a great job memorializing the horror of the day, and putting it into historical, architectural, and religious context. What struck me — and moved me — the most was the purely democratic, mixed-up, we’re-all-in-this-together nature of the place. On the day we were there, the museum was filled with primarily non-white visitors (of many hues, languages, religions and dress codes). And those who were killed that day, and honored beautifully in photographs, video, and narrative, were also from all backgrounds, nations, religion, linguistic groups and any other way you can slice and dice our species into categories.
There we all were, together, in hushed reverence, gazing at the charred hunks of fire engines, the twisted remains of what were once great steel girders, and most of all, the faces of the 2,983 victims of the attacks. All those faces — any one of them could have been your brother, your neighbor, your girlfriend, your cousin, your college sweetheart, your pharmacist or doctor or dry cleaner or 7th grade math teacher: photo after photo in room after room built in the footprint of the south tower. It’s like leafing through the pages of a giant yearbook, so the faces you’re gazing at are as large as they would be in the mirror, or larger. Lily white? Not so much. The nearly 3,000 who died from incendiary hatred seemed to be, like the museum visitors, from all walks of life and all manner of human genotype.
What I thought was: Thank you, America, for doing such a good job. Really: My heart swelled with pride and gratitude, something it hasn’t felt much in the current political climate. Like many other American crossroads — hospitals, the YMCA, airports — the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is a living breathing testament to how much better this country is than the you-versus-me rhetoric and insanity now spewing out the hate camps and echoed in inflammatory rhetoric by the president.
You could argue that New York City is hardly representative of heartland America, that it’s uniquely diverse, unusually cosmopolitan, American only by virtue of its geographical placement. Except that New York isn’t alone in its population mixing. Houston is more than 40% Latino; Los Angeles is home to an even larger percentage of Latinos, and is more than 10% Asian and almost 10% African-American. And along with its African American and white citizens, Elgin, Ill. is home to a rapidly growing Laotian community. All of these places are “real” America.
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Love it or hate it, New York is and always has been the harbinger of things to come. Remember when the only place you could get a decent bagel was in New York? Now you can get them pretty much anywhere, including in Baton Rouge, La., where my family and I lived for years. Ditto sushi, French baguettes and emergency room doctors from Pakistan.
On the morning of 9/11, I was driving down Government Street in Baton Rouge when the music I was listening to was interrupted by the news that an airplane had struck one of the twin towers. An hour later, I picked up my kids from school. By the end of the day, amidst rumors that the Louisiana-Texas petrochemical corridor would be the terrorists’ next target, a group of citizens had arranged round-the-clock volunteers to act as security guards for the city’s several Lebanese, Persian and Halal restaurants. Other volunteers waited in line for hours to donate blood. Still others held prayer vigils for peace.
And this in a red city named after a red stick in a red state.
Because, folks, when the chips are down, real Americans don’t rabble-rouse, tweet, threaten or chant Nazi slogans. Nor do they use the memory of 9/11 to stir up divisiveness and hatred. They roll up their sleeves and get to work.
Jennifer Anne Moses, a writer for numerous publications, is the author of four books, including Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou, and Visiting Hours .
