September 11: Our National Tragedy

Almost all of us can recall exactly where we were on September 11, 2001. I was in college in Ohio, tutoring at the writing center. I remember that the entire campus of 20,000 stopped in their tracks and then turned to one another in small groups. We whispered rumors, tried to access information on an internet that was too jammed to work, and hugged one another. We each called our families (when the cell phones were working), crying, terrified. We gauged the possibility of our portion of Ohio being a target for another plane to crash. Since our families weren’t there – some were an hour away, some across the country – we became each others’ families for that awful day. And the beauty was, in the midst of death and fear, we bonded and found links that we’d never even tried to search for before. The cocky football jock was an American, the silly girl with the huge boobs was an American, the dumb guy who made bad jokes was an American. I felt a solidarity that I’d never felt before.

I don’t recall ever once hearing anything about religion in those first few hours. I was in a place in my life where I was drifting in a cloudy agnostic sea, but I believe I would have slipped back into religion if those around me had, as well. If I close my eyes and imagine the old building that housed the writing center, with twenty of us in it, scrambling to watch the television, holding hands, crying, I can’t recall one prayer. Our director, a devout Catholic, never once uttered a religious word. No one pulled out a Bible or prayer beads. I know, of course, that there were thousands of people who immediately ran to church or started to pray, but no one around me did. So as the weeks and months went by, and as we learned more about the attacks and the people that died, I was horrified to find this country become divided by religion. I never once thought of the attacks of September 11th as a religious hotspot. Terrorists, I thought, wouldn’t be religious. I’d been spoon-fed the Bible my whole life, and all I’d ever heard about was love and goodwill and peace and all that.

It was then, more than ever, that I started researching the negatives of religion. Previously, I had been uncertain about a god and uncomfortable with religion, but I never thought of the religious as bad, per say. But as I educated myself about religion, I began to see just how harmful religion really can be. Not only were there hateful Christians – of whom I was well aware – there were suicide-bombing Muslims and pleasure-denying Buddhists and self-loathing Hindus. Just like the rest of America, I was forced toward a world-view – only this one was about religion around the world and just how awful it could be.

Of course, the attack on September 11th was a reprehensible act that resulted in the deaths of almost 3,000 people from all different types of lifestyles. However, it did have some positive outcomes. Americans are more aware of the world around them; a close friend commented, a day or two after the attacks, that we had “all lost our innocence at the same time.” We don’t trust blindly as often. We started to accept that we can’t always be politically correct and keep everyone safe. Of course, some have become more religious, but statistics show that although church attendance increased after 9/11, it’s since waned dramatically. And for me, personally, September 11th was the impetus to start looking more closely at the world around me, and to learn about the reprehensible dealings of world religions. After that day, I could no longer trudge through the world, unconcerned around seemingly innocuous groups around the world. And this thought process eventually led me to atheism.

This weekend, America reflects on the events of 10 years ago. We will mourn; we will remember; we will honor our dead. But when the weekend has passed, and life marches on as usual, it would do us well to remember that, in our moment of need, we turned to one another – people that we could touch, and have a conversation with, and get support from – and not to a mystical cloud in the sky that will never answer our questions. Perhaps that is the best way to honor the memory of our dead – by loving those that are around us, those that we still have, and not wasting any more time on an imaginary deity and ignoring the beauty and wonder that we have around us.