Brick

And I feel like a bee­tle on its back
And there’s no way for me to get up
Love’ll get you like a case of anthrax
And that’s some­thing I don’t want to catch
– Gang of Four, “(Love Like) Anthrax,” 1978

Copy­right 2011 Ben S. Pollock

JUST AFTER ELEVEN — Two hun­dred eighty-something mil­lion Amer­i­cans had noth­ing on the few thou­sand peo­ple who sus­tained a direct loss in the ter­ror­ist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Me among the majority.

Maybe 9/11 cost me the career as I was pre­dict­ing it at the time. Maybe it cost my mom aspects of her last years. Maybe it cost me what my 40s could have been and can’t be reclaimed in my 50s. But also per­haps sub­stan­tially every­thing that hap­pened through yes­ter­day, the 9/11 10th anniver­sary, might have hap­pened through 2011 regardless.

Would the United States have been in one or two wars in the greater Ara­bian Penin­sula googol­plex in the last decade? Prob­a­bly, but maybe not two at once. Would the U.S. econ­omy gone up and down 1 1/2 to 2 times? Sure, a lot can hap­pen in 10 years.

Nearly 3,000 civil­ians and respon­ders died in those first hours, sur­vivors are suf­fer­ing long-term ail­ments from inhal­ing toxic dust from the smol­der­ing wreck­age. To con­sider the first 9/11 decade does not den­i­grate true responses to the assault.

Vol­un­teer mil­i­tary per­son­nal (there being no draft to make par­tic­i­pa­tion — even with defer­ments and exemp­tions — more demo­c­ra­tic) have been killed in action in the Near East for actions ratio­nal­ized by 9/11. We mustn’t for­get their indi­vid­ual sac­ri­fice, even as we are com­pelled to ques­tion what sol­diers, sailors, marines and air­men were sent to do. Openly doubt­ing cur­rent and past lead­ers is an expres­sion of Amer­i­can freedom.

“Atten­tion, atten­tion must finally be paid to such a per­son.” — Death of a Salesman

On Mon­day, Sept. 10, 2001, My Beloved and I fig­ured out details of how I would drive 50 miles to Fort Smith fairly early Tuesday.

My mom, Joanne Mendel Pol­lock, was being dis­charged from St. Edward Mercy Med­ical Cen­ter and needed to get to her house, the fam­ily home since the mid-1950s. She’d had another seri­ous emphy­sema episode and got inten­sive lung treat­ments and tests for a few days. This was the hos­pi­tal­iza­tion that finally con­vinced her to move to assisted living.

Watch­ing CNN and ABC delayed my leav­ing Tues­day morn­ing. Maybe Mom should be put in a cab? A lit­tle check­ing put that option to rest. The National Guard was not clos­ing the Inter­state High­way Sys­tem. I’d already got­ten per­mis­sion for a half day off; nei­ther the exec­u­tive edi­tor nor the man­ag­ing edi­tor had a prob­lem with me still using that per­sonal time; dead­lines were extended for attack cov­er­age. My car had nearly a full tank. Mom said it was up to me.

She needed me. It’s good to be needed, to be use­ful, espe­cially in a time of national cri­sis. The sec­ond plane had hit, but nei­ther had col­lapsed when I backed out of the car­port in Fayet­teville, with NPR’s sober con­tin­u­ous cov­er­age broad­cast on KUAF.

This trip gave me the report­ing used in my weekly col­umn, to run the fol­low­ing Sun­day. In it, the trip was only “fam­ily busi­ness.” Here’s what wasn’t in the piece:

• See­ing the hos­pi­tal staff, doc­tors to order­lies, cran­ing their necks up at the ceiling-mounted TVs every chance they could.
• The unusual quiet in the Wal-Mart Neigh­bor­hood Mar­ket on Rogers Avenue, where Mom picked up med­i­cines on the way home; the cashier was near tears and at the same time had the pan­icked eyes of a fright­ened pet.
• Mom’s and my quiet talk about her plans for the week and who’d come check on her.

Help­ing Mom make the best choices for her had lit­tle to do with 9/11, out­side of the need-writ-large les­son that delays in acknowl­edg­ing the obvi­ous actu­ally hurt not help. Mom’s blud­geon was liv­ing inde­pen­dently would be impos­si­ble within months.

Out­side of tim­ing, what does 9/11 have to do with the last 2 1/2 years of her life, out­side of being a cal­en­dar cue for me? She was 20 years old when Pearl Har­bor was attacked, liv­ing in Cal­i­for­nia when enemy sight­ings were claimed, with orders for civil­ians to head to shel­ters. In such times, one was forced to make hard deci­sions with no dither­ing. She told me of leav­ing her apart­ment with her driver’s license, lip­stick and cigarettes.

Is that sad? Sure, the end of Mom’s vigor. But within six months we sold the house and moved her to an apart­ment 15 min­utes away in Fayet­teville, and the next two years had hun­dreds of hours of shar­ing with my mom.

“It doesn’t take much to see that the prob­lems of … lit­tle peo­ple don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” — Casablanca

Also not in this columnist’s 9/11 piece was the office atmos­phere as seen when I arrived around 1 p.m. All news­rooms have a Dis­as­ter Mode, and the one that Tues­day was lit­tle dif­fer­ent from any other function-shift to that of cov­er­ing mas­sive nat­ural or man­made dis­as­ters. Inform­ing the pub­lic in depth, culling out rumors and nar­row views, with imme­di­acy, is what news­pa­pers do in crises, with a reli­a­bil­ity that no other medium yet manages.

I had just com­pleted a year as edi­to­r­ial page edi­tor for The Morn­ing News of North­west Arkansas. Writ­ing duties were split with the exec­u­tive edi­tor, and we’d edit one another. Before I was pro­moted to the job in August 2000, from metro edi­tor, for decades he had writ­ten nearly all edi­to­ri­als. He wanted that World Trade Center/Pentagon/Shanksville one, yes sir, and would com­plete it while coor­di­nat­ing over­all cov­er­age with the man­ag­ing edi­tor. That was fine with me, and I helped other edi­tors that after­noon and evening.

When the exec­u­tive edi­tor gave it to me, I couldn’t get past his head­line and lede para­graph. I don’t claim to remem­ber it pre­cisely, but this respected news­man of retire­ment age wrote to the effect that he had had it with all the Arabs and all the Mus­lims, he didn’t care which.

“We can’t run this,” I said.

“Why the hell not?” he said (and we never before dia­logued with any heat in my near-three years with this paper).

The most reli­able news sources, I said, reported the attacks very likely were orga­nized by al-Qaida but cau­tioned con­fir­ma­tion would take a while.

“For all any­one knows tonight, this could be another Okla­homa City 1995 and Tim McVeigh,” I told my boss. White Amer­i­can yokels could fly planes as eas­ily as drive tons of fer­til­izer down­town. He rewrote the editorial.

At the end of the week, he edited my Sun­day col­umn with essen­tially no changes. My 9/11 opin­ion was to ques­tion indi­rectly the role of Big Oil in the response that the U.S. would choose.

On Wednes­day the 19th, the exec­u­tive edi­tor asked me to come in a half-hour early Thurs­day. At that time he sat me down in his office with the human resources direc­tor, and explained my job was being cut, and me along with it, along with three other staffers.

From all reli­able reports, my lay­off had been months in the plan­ning and was directly a back­track­ing from a large expan­sion the year before, the one that made me edi­to­ri­al­ist. My duties reverted to the exec­u­tive edi­tor. He retired within months.

Sept. 20, 2001, began what turned out to be 30 months of unem­ploy­ment. Six months later, IBM down­sized My Beloved, and she ended up unem­ployed 30 months her­self. In the interim I com­pleted grad­u­ate school, taught under­grads, filled in writ­ing edi­to­ri­als for the North­west Arkansas Times and worked part time for my old employer, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Ten months after I received my master’s diploma, the Demzette was between hir­ing freezes, had an open­ing and put me on full time.

Out­side of tim­ing, what does 9/11 have to do with the mod­est mil­len­nial reces­sion and the first months-long jolt in the decline of print media? I am not claim­ing, “me, too,” but 10 years out, let’s take a look. That’s all.

“We got a thou­sand points of light” — Neil Young, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” 1989

The small band of ter­ror­ists died in this clus­ter of sui­cide attacks. Their han­dlers were killed or incar­cer­ated, along with thou­sands of inno­cents, past the first and sec­ond terms of George II. Osama bin Laden was killed May 1, 2011, in Pak­istan, 2.5 years into the pres­i­dency of Barack Obama.

Al-Qaida’s main pro­tec­tors, the Tal­iban, still con­trol lots of Afghanistan and parts of Pak­istan. Yet, U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan after nearly 10 years.

U.S. troops remain in Iraq. George II used 9/11 to invade Iraq and top­ple Sad­dam Hus­sein, nei­ther coun­try nor despot hav­ing any­thing to do with al-Qaida, and “weapons of mass destruc­tion” a canard because George I took care of any a decade ear­lier, 1991. Wash­ing­ton leaves in power any num­ber of bru­tal dic­ta­tors, because they have eco­nomic and strate­gic use to our coun­try, even when these men have taken Amer­i­can lives.

Pres­i­dent Obama says like pre­de­ces­sors of both par­ties, diplo­mats and gen­er­als, that mil­i­tary with­drawals have to be grad­ual. One final les­son of Viet­nam was that once the com­man­der in chief calls it, retreat takes but weeks. Would a clear 1972 pull­out have had sim­i­lar results to the real one in 1975, aside from three years’ worth of South­east Asia deaths (theirs and ours) and domes­tic tumult?

Maybe the rea­son for a stepped “regime change” is more about pro­tect­ing U.S. inter­ests. Fur­ther, per­haps there’s no bet­ter train­ing for U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel than real wars, espe­cially in this time of what to us are uncon­ven­tional enemy tac­tics. Per­haps the Pen­ta­gon finds this unsim­u­lated, non-games of war is worth the cost of a rel­a­tively small num­ber of lives of young Amer­i­can patri­ots in uniform.

Eco­nomic reces­sions come and reces­sions go, well they don’t go away fast, but for 10 years the United States seems to have pre­pared for the next 9/11.

Per­son­ally, I’m rehearsed and ready: I often remind my fam­ily that I love them. And my resume stands ready to ship out.