Shakira's View of 9.11

It's not that I don't care about what happened on September 11. I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news: here in my apartment. I had just signed a lease to live by myself in my new place a week before. I had just returned from vacation in Belize with Big Guy. I had just decided to start a new job. When I signed that lease and accepted that new position, fresh from vacation, I felt like my life was finally getting back on track. Since graduating from college, I had been feeling like a vagrant. I used to joke about how I didn't know where I'd end up on particular night—especially if it was a Saturday. It's odd that maybe 9/11 will always represent to me the fact that I, personally, was on a track to new beginnings.

But on September 11 I was getting ready for work at my old job, after giving my two weeks notice, so I felt like my life was already improving. I vividly remember turning on the hair dryer and hearing the DJs on the radio say, "The World Trade Center is on fire." I turned off the hair dryer to listen. The first plane had hit the first tower. There was no more music that day. Constant news coming over the wires—the phone, the TV, the Web—moment after moment, each bit more horrifying and unbelievable than the last.

My phone rang. El Dilector, asking frantically if I had heard from Big Guy. "We need him here at work," he told me. "Everything is going crazy." Later that morning, I made it to work, but like most everyone across the country, I wasn't doing much. I mean, really, I was a short-timer at that point, and that day in particular, no one was doing much. We were all watching the news with shock. So many people were hungry for news that I could barely manage to load CNN.com on my browser. And El Dilector called that morning again, this time screaming into the phone, "They've hit the Pentagon! We're at war!" I picked up the phone and called Mom. "Have you watched the news this morning?" I asked her. "No, why?" she said. "Turn on the TV," I responded. "It's pretty brutal. And—I love you, Mom." I tell my Mom I love her at least once a week, but that day, it seemed just a bit more important to say it.

The rest of the day is a blur to me. Big Guy told me the other day that he and his brother went to Ginny's Little Longhorn that day at noon and started drinking beer. I don't remember that afternoon or evening, but I do remember the day after it happened. I was in my new apartment, which didn't have Internet access yet, and my cell phone had broken. It just turned off and never came back on. In my constant effort to save money after getting burned in a layoff, I had chosen not to get a LAN line. Suddenly I realized I had no connection to the outside world. Fighter jets rumbled overhead as they patrolled the President's former hometown. I sat in my new—independent—apartment and listened to them and feared for the future.

But in all the horror and shock and sadness and fear, I never felt any anger. I still don't. And that's why, as September 11 rolls around again, I feel a strange sort of emptiness. I'm not angry. People moved from their shock and horror to a terrible sort of revenge mode. We tend to do that. We must blame. We must have an eye for an eye. It's not necessarily wrong. It just is. But the United States went after Al Quaida and Afghanistan with a vengeance hell-bent on righting a wrong. But how does killing more people—many of them innocent—fix anything in this fucked up world?

It was—and still is—a horrible tragedy, but I fail to see why it's more horrible than the tragedy that occurs around the world every single day of our lives. Tragedy that could be avoided if only our country and our government would do things a bit differently. Big Guy told me today that something like 7,500 people a day die each day from hunger. That's 2.5 times as many people that died in the 9/11 attacks. That's each day of the year. These are people who die simply because they don't have enough to eat. That's something we could avoid. That's something the United States, as the richest country in the world, could DO something about. It's much more productive, cost-efficient and humanitarian than going into the Middle East—a place torn and ravaged with war each and every day for YEARS—with guns blazing.

Our attitude of "We're the United States, we're BAD-ASS, you just can't fuck with us," is not going to cut it anymore. Because someone did. We hate to admit they got to us, they wounded our pride, they made us look stupid and they made us fear. That may be most important. They made us fear. And that's what we're fighting for: our wounded pride. When what we should be fighting for—or more importantly, trying to figure out, without guns and tanks and mostly, hatred—is the idea that we are all one on this Earth. We are NOT Americans, Afghans, Africans, or Britains. We are all one. We are people. Let's figure out how to live together. A pissing contest just creates more animosity...and hate...and more chances for 9/11 to happen over and over again.

-Shakira 9.11.02