Nine years ago

Nine years ago I was sitting in a cafe with a book and a coffee.  The spring sun was streaming through the window, a fine Tuesday morning.

I was in the third year of my music degree: the most pressing worry about my exam program was getting Messiaen's Les Anges up to speed (in the event, the examiners didn't want to hear it, and the instrument packed it in halfway through the second piece).  I think I was reading up for an essay when the phone rang, heralding a call from my mother to ask if I'd heard about what was happening in New York.

As the day proceeded I ran across several responses to the events of the night.  Over the days leading to the end of the week I found myself booked to sing at a couple of services in city churches which had been rustled together to give people an opportunity to give shape to their grief.  I sat through a choir rehearsal where people shared their incomprehension at having watched the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers in real time.

The photographs in the newspapers over the week or so following kept events firmly at the front of peoples' minds.  It is said that every American has viewed the footage of the two aeroplanes being flown into the World Trade Centre towers at least a dozen times each year since 2001.  The image certainly has generation-defining power: people will never forget where they were when they first saw it.

Yet I have never watched it.  I have not had a television since September 2000, and it had been about three years before that since I sat before the box without falling into instant slumber.  I know you can get the footage from several different angles on YouTube, but the question has to be asked: why chose to live through those distressing moments for the rest of your life?

We have seen so much grief come out of the last nine years, what with one unnecessary war, another one where the parameters for success have yet to be defined, and the assembly of a legal machinery which poses serious challenges to the Western tradition of civil liberties, embodied in the endless queues one must pass through in order to travel on international flights.  The immediate response to the threat of Al-Quaeda attacks was to move to erode some of the basic principles of Common Law, such as the encroachments on Habeas Corpus endured by so many held captive in Guantanamo Bay, and the attempt to impose martial justice on civilian defendants through the invention of unauthorised enemy combatant status.  Arguably, the revival of Cold War rhetoric that was rolled in with this has seen the old narrative of civilization conflict updated, where Muslim and Islam are chained to the wall where Communism once stood.

Next year will be the big anniversary, although I suspect the good people of New York will be seeing progress rather than completion of the new World Trade Centre complex, which is starting to take shape.