Remembering September 11

Seven years ago today, Tom was with the kids at the dentist. He called me and told me that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I assumed an accident, and a little plane; he called back not long afterwards to say that a second plane had struck the other tower. It wasn't long afterwards that I remember seeing the first tower collapse, on the television screen in a conference room in my office building. I remember later hearing that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania, and someone in the office trying to call family in the state, and her fear, when her call did not go through. That night emailing an acquaintance who worked at the Pentagon (she was all right) and another whose office I thought was in lower Manhattan (he was all right too, although the offices were not).

I remember for a few days afterwards, the normally sullen, aggressive drivers among whom I have to make may way to work each day seemed a little less, well, sullen and aggressive. A little less likely to honk the horn for a moment's delay when the light turned green, a little more likely to let someone in who needed to change lanes. It only lasted a couple of days, though.

Before September 11, the newspapers had been full of lurid speculation about the congressman from California and a missing intern. I remember standing out in the street a few nights later, talking to my friend Carol, saying that I would be okay with being scared, as long as the public discourse sayed on to things that mattered instead of the kind of stuff that had been in play before.

Tom and I watched Charlie Wilson's War a couple of months ago, the story about how a Congressman from Texas got the U.S. Congress to support the covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s. He could get Congress to appropriate ever increasing amounts to support the military action, but once the Soviets withdrew, there was no interest in building the schools that might have secured the peace. The movie ends with a great quote from Congressman Wilson, something to the effect that we won the war, and then we screwed everything up.

One of the books I am currently reading is Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. Greg Mortenson tried to climb K2, didn't make it to the summit, and on his way back got lost. He ended up in a village that didn't have a school, and decided that he would come back and build one there. I have not gotten to the part of the book where he actually gets the school built, but on the back of the book it says that over the next decade Mortensen built 55 schools " - especially for girls - in the forbidding terrain that gave birth to the Taliban."

Greg Mortenson is still building schools. According to the acknowledgements at the end of the book, it costs "$1 a month for one child's education in Pakistan or Afghanistan, a penny to buy a pencil, and a teacher's salary averages $1 a day." Contributions go to the Central Asia Institute, http://www.ikat.org/, in Bozeman, Montana.

It's been seven years. This year, I think I will remember those events of seven years ago not by flying the flag or by a moment of silence for those who died when the planes crashed, but with my checkbook. If you want to, too, here's the address:

Central Asia Institute
P.O. Box 7209
Bozeman, MT 59771

Primary prevention is almost always best.