Sadness drove me to leave New York City on Sept. 11 this year.
Part of the sadness was the obvious loss of 2,800 lives in a dizzying attack that, even a year later, still feels impossibly surreal.
Images of the planes crashing into the buildings like torpedoes, of the buildings spewing smoke like chimney stacks, and of their final, incomprehensible crashing to the ground in unbelievable rubble, all began running on the TV stations in an inevitable media onslaught that started long before I departed the city Sept. 10, the day before the one-year anniversary.
I am on the treadmill at the gym that day, and all four televisions in front of me have some sort of 9-11 remembrance show. I randomly plug in my head phones to one, and as I jog, I listen in a state of suspended disbelief as one woman tells the story of her firefighter husband, Patrick, a member of an elite team trained to rescue other firefighters in trouble. His squad was sent into one of the burning towers last year after a mayday call came from other firefighters trapped on the 50th floor of one the buildings.
A documentary maker had captured Patrick and on the ground, as he peered up at the towering infernos and dressed to sacrifice his life to save his pals, unaware that he was walking into his grave.
Watching the footage in retrospect, knowing that soon after Patrick walks into the building it will crumble on top of him, was like watching death in slow motion. I wanted to scream at the television, to tell Patrick to stop, to warn him, to save him.
But of course, it was a year too late.
At the end of the segment, the widow held up her baby boy—born a few weeks after Sept. 11 and the death of her husband. The boy's name was Patrick, too, and in the show, the widowed wife called him the last gift from her husband. By this time, my face was unapologetically wet with tears.
That kind of tangible sadness was everywhere in New York City as Sept. 11 approached.
But along with it, I feel a different kind of sadness and loss, too. And I know the things that I grieve for are not things that most Americans want to hear, particularly on the Sept. 11 anniversary date. And that fact by itself fills me with an even greater sense of sadness and loss, so much so that I know I must leave my city.
For me, a lot has been lost this past year, as an American, as an Arab, as the son of a Muslim, and as a gay man.
As an American, I grieve the dangerous loss of precious civil liberties that our government has arrogantly eroded in the past year—whimsically declaring even American citizens "enemy combatants" and stripping them of their most basic Constitutional rights; tampering with the judicial system, even outright circumventing it; arresting more than 1,200 people in secrecy and silence, detaining them indefinitely without legal representation—even without releasing their names; and ominously encouraging Americans to spy on each other and, via a toll free hotline to the Justice Department, report anyone or anything arbitrarily deemed "suspicious."
What fills me with even greater sadness, however, is the way the government has shrewdly marketed the pain and loss of people like Patrick the firefighter in a highly successful PR campaign to convince other Americans that the way to deal with this tragedy is to bargain away freedoms, and thus trample the very essence of what it means to be American. The protests and outcries against the power grab have been minimal, at best, and those of us who have raised our voices against it have often been called "un-American." To be so out of sync with the rest of America only adds to my sense of isolation and loneliness.
But if I feel outcast as an American in my own country, as someone of Arab descent and Muslim heritage, I feel an utter pariah. Sure, George Bush and a few other political leaders have given superficial lip service to the notion that America is at war with terrorists, not Arabs and Muslims. But his words are mostly to appease foreign leaders of Arab and Muslim countries who he needs as allies in sticky military maneuvers overseas.
If we are honest, the true sentiment here in America is that all Arabs, all Muslims are rightly suspect. Countless numbers of everyday citizens have repeatedly told me so, point blank. Bush and other political leaders can make public nice talk all they want, but it's no coincidence that the FBI systematically interviewed 5,000 Arab-Americans since Sept. 11, or that the non-citizens who have been detained and locked up without charges or hearings are virtually all Arabs or Muslims. This has set the tone for America, and every Arab, every Muslim here lives with the constant suspicion and derision of the collective guilt of 19 hijackers we never knew and vehemently decry.
Finally, as a gay man, I have lost the sense of safety I used to think was inherent for me in the gay community. The past year has shown me—in conversations with other men at gay bars, in grossly misinformed editorials in gay newspapers and in stomach-churning hate mail from gay and lesbian readers—that the one community I have always counted and depended on most is not necessarily a place of refuge.
MubarakDah@aol.com
