I am also a we

I was eleven, sitting in Mrs. Landsaw’s sixth-grade classroom, when Mr. Gochenauer came to the door and told her to turn on the news. So we watched. We watched the second plane go into the South Tower, live. A little later we watched small specks come away from the towers and fall, and I remember the room going quiet in stages, as each of us worked out, one at a time, that the specks were people.

A lot of you have a room like that. If you were old enough, you can probably still tell me who told you and where you were standing when you heard. This week marked twenty-five years, and I’ve spent it the way many people have, with the documentaries and the archival footage and the songs. I’ve listened to Darryl Worley’s “Have You Forgotten?” I’ve listened to Alan Jackson and to Toby Keith. And the thing that keeps moving me, underneath all of it, is what happened that fall to the word we.

The weeks the country was one

For a while after that morning, the country felt like one thing. Flags on the overpasses. Lines to give blood that wrapped around the block. On the evening of the 11th, members of Congress stood together on the Capitol steps and sang “God Bless America,” not especially well, and meant it.

You can hear that fall in its songs, and I don’t think you can understand what the country felt without them. Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)” is the grief. It doesn’t argue anything. It walks through the ordinary ways people took that morning in, calling the ones they loved, going to church, sitting in front of the news, and it gives us a man who admits he isn’t the one to explain the politics of it, only that he knows faith and hope and love, and that the greatest of those is love. Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” is the fury. It opens on his father, an Army veteran, and then says out loud what a great many people were carrying in their chests that fall: that whoever did this was going to answer for it. Worley’s song came a year and a half later and asked whether we had already started to forget. Each of those songs is honest about something real. None of them is the whole of it.

The stories from inside the day are mostly stories of people who had never met acting as if they had known each other for years. The one I keep going back to is the boats. When lower Manhattan was cut off, with the bridges and tunnels closed and the dust coming down the streets, people crowded to the water’s edge, and the boats came. Ferries came. Tugboats came. Dinner-cruise boats and fishing boats and private boats came. They had been pulling people off the seawall for close to two hours before the Coast Guard got on the radio and asked for all available boats, and then even more came. By the end of the day they had carried something like half a million people off the island. Nobody rehearsed that. Each crew did the thing in front of it, and all of it together became an evacuation.

For a little while, a great many people found out that I is also a we: that the stranger next to you on the pier is not a stranger in any way that counts.

In an earlier letter I leaned on an old phrase from southern Africa, a person is a person through other persons. What that fall did was make it visible to a whole country at once. We didn’t become a we that day. We had been one the entire time, and the day tore away whatever had been hiding it.

Running toward

That same thing is what sent people up the stairs. Firefighters and police officers climbed into buildings everyone else was trying to leave, and many of them didn’t come back down. I don’t believe most of them were thinking about the men who flew the planes. They were thinking about the people on the floors above them.

Here I have to put myself into the letter, because I can’t write this one honestly from outside it. Later, I enlisted in the Army. I count myself among the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who went, and I want to tell you what I believe about why a lot of us went, and then where that belief runs out.

What I believe is that a person can run into the fire out of love and not out of hate. Some of the people who served oriented themselves against something: an enemy, a face they wanted to make pay. I understand that. The anger had a reason. But others, and I would like to count myself among them, oriented themselves toward the people behind them. They went as defenders of what they loved. That orientation matters, because it changes what you are for. If you’re turned that way, you don’t have to carry righteous anger to do the work. You don’t have to make anyone feel the pain you felt. The job is only to see that the pain isn’t visited on anyone else.

Where it runs out

A defender still has to fight someone. Oriented toward love or not, making sure it never happened again meant going after the people who did it, and that meant killing. Which is still, in its own way, answering pain with pain. The difference between I’m protecting what I love and I’m making them pay is a real difference in the person carrying the rifle. I’m not sure it’s much of a difference to the person on the other end of it. And in the wars that followed, a great many people who had nothing to do with that morning died. A good orientation doesn’t take that back. I said something like this in the letter about amends, and it holds here: the harm stays harm, and nothing you become afterward turns it into something else.

The songs carry the same tangle, and I love them anyway. Keith’s anger was a true line in that music; the country felt it, and a song that pretended otherwise would have been lying. But it’s also the line that pointed toward hitting back, and I can’t cleanly pull the unity in those songs out of the anger in them.

The we also had edges. Four days after the attacks, a Sikh man named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot and killed outside his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, by a man who wanted revenge for the attacks and chose him because of his turban. Sodhi had been inside that we the entire time. The same feeling that put strangers into boats together also drew a line, and in the same week most Americans found themselves inside it, and some were put outside it.

I don’t know how to resolve this. I’ve turned it over, and I haven’t gotten there.

Unison and polyphony

What I do have comes from music. I sang in choirs for years and played euphonium, and music gives me a way to hold more than one line at once.

When a crowd sings in unison, everyone on the same melody, it is one of the most powerful sounds people make. The Capitol steps were unison. A stadium is unison. But unison has a weakness built into it: it only holds while everyone sings the same notes. A voice singing something different doesn’t sound like part of the song. It sounds wrong, and a crowd singing in unison will turn around to find the wrong note. I think that’s part of what happened to the we in the fall of 2001. It was real, and it was unison, and whatever didn’t match could be heard as a threat.

There’s another way for many voices to make music. Polyphony is several complete melodies moving at once, each one whole enough to sing by itself, written so that together they make something none of them could make alone. The lines don’t have to match. Often their difference is where the depth of the piece comes from. The boats in the harbor were much closer to polyphony than the Capitol steps were. No two crews were doing the same thing. Each did what only it could do, and it was one rescue. Even the radio that fall was closer to parts than to unison, if you listened: Jackson’s grief and Keith’s fury, back to back, two complete songs that together said more than either could alone.

Polyphony also has a place for dissonance. A composer will hold a note against a chord it doesn’t belong to, on purpose, and let it hang there while the ear leans forward waiting for it to resolve. Musicians call it a suspension.

That’s where I would put what I don’t know. I believe in the love of the ones who ran toward the fire. I also know what the fighting cost people who never chose any part of it. Both lines are true, and they don’t agree, and I would rather keep both of them sounding than force one to become the other so the chord sounds finished. Some suspensions resolve late. Some, I suspect, don’t resolve in the span of one life, and we hold the note anyway and hand it on to people who may hear further than we can.

What still holds us

Twenty-five years on, the ones who ran up the stairs are still holding us, in a plain way. The recovery workers who breathed that dust for months and kept coming back. The families who turned what they lost into something that serves other people. The we they acted out didn’t expire when the flags came down off the overpasses.

What I’m left asking is what kind of we to be. The unison kind rises fast and loud in a crisis, and it tends to need an enemy to keep its shape. The polyphonic kind is slower. It asks each of us to keep our own line whole, and to let it sound alongside lines that aren’t ours, including some we’d rather not hear.

One small thing, if you want it

Here’s something to try, offered and nothing more.

The next time you feel a we rise up in you, at a memorial or a ballgame, after a storm, when your town gets hard news, let it move you. It’s telling you something true about what you are. Then, somewhere in it, ask one quiet question: is there room in this for a line that doesn’t sound like mine? You don’t have to do anything with the answer. Only notice whether the we you’re feeling is singing in unison, or in parts.

And if you tell your where-were-you story this week, you might add one stranger to it. Someone you never met, who did something that day. They’re part of your story whether you ever learned their name or not.

I’m going to leave the tension where it is. Loving what you defend, and harming people in its defense, are both lines in this piece. I haven’t heard how they resolve. I’m still listening.