The ten year anniversary of a monumental tragedy in our nation has me filled with dread. Not that I’ll be reminded of the helplessness of that day, the dread and fear for the future of our country, or that I’ll feel overwhelming grief over the thousands that died that day.
My angst this time around is that these events will be hyped and rehashed in the media, in classrooms and in the virulent hate-filled splinter groups that have sprung up since then. The re-living, the re-imagining, in their minds, serves to whip Americans into another frenzy of hate that erupted on that day against ALL “Arab/Muslim” people, no matter what their political leanings or personal histories.
I had eventually begun to feel that as bad as the tragedy had been, perhaps it could have served to remind us that we, as Americans, are not the center of the universe, and that our casual disregard of cultures and religions different from our own would wake people up to things going on in today’s world, make people WANT to learn about another faith, to understand it and discover how Americans might be mistaken in their acknowledgment of it. To my horror, the ‘tolerance’ that I had taken for granted as being GUARANTEED in the U.S. Constitution evaporated before my eyes.
Not only were Arab immigrants treated as a threat, ANY immigrants came to be hated and mistrusted and basically told to “go back to where you came from”. In my lifetime, as a second generation American granddaughter of European immigrants, I had never witnessed such hate toward immigrants. People like me, whose ancestors were ALL immigrants started to act like they had never encountered anyone from outside of the U.S., nor did they ever want to.
The timing of 9/11 and the ten-year anniversary of it are bookends to my residence in Rochester, Minnesota, where I work as an ESL teacher to students from around the globe. I have counseled many students since that day, trying to reassure them that not all Americans hated them, and that they have as much right to be here as anyone else.
I felt in 2008 that the election of an African American president was a step in the right direction, but I see now that it has only permitted people to express their hatred even more openly, disguising it with politics or anything BUT what it actually is: hatred. I’m not giving up on the U.S., though, because I feel that it is like a wounded butterfly—beautiful and fragile, but still able to survive. That is what I will be focusing on next week.
