For some, the road we've traveled since 9/11 has led nowhere

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. There is a ton of stuff on television, and lots of stuff written about what it meant to America, questions about whether or not we are any safer, and weepy op-ed pieces on heroics ad nauseam.

Sept. 11 was not an abstract event for me and my family. On my dad's side, the Cantor in Cantor-Fitzgerald was family, and even though B.G. Cantor was already gone, other family members still had business in that building. On my mother's side, Arthur was at Fred Alger, and his son Kenny, oddly enough, was at Cantor Fitzgerald. I would later learn that a college friend was on American Airlines Flight 11. Another friend who worked in the Pentagon happened not to be at work that day because he was moving into a new house, and that kept him out of harm's way. And my childhood best friend, who would've been arriving in the World Trade Center PATH station at that time, was delayed at home because her daughter barfed on her on the way to school.

I was here in Minnesota watching it all from a surreal distance. For days and days, when I wasn't at my job as a corporate travel agent — trying to secure hotel rooms and rental cars because planes weren't flying and people needed to get home to their families — I watched the planes hit the towers over and over and over. I was haunted by the knowledge that Kenny called his wife to say he was on his way down the stairs and would stop to find his dad. Neither ever emerged from the rubble.

The constant rehashing went on and on. I hated them all. I hated the people who talked about it even though they knew nothing. I hated the people who spouted off about how they once saw the twin towers so they understood New Yorkers' feelings, when clearly they had no clue. Our hometown had been attacked, our friends and relatives and neighbors had disappeared in a cloud of flame and ash. We could barely understand our own feelings.

Every year on 9/11 I cringe as the baloney starts up all over again. The uproar over a Muslim community center and mosque several blocks away from the pit that was once the WTC was disgusting. Would anyone have said such a thing to a church or synagogue group? It was a national media feeding frenzy that manipulated it into a blood circus. Most New Yorkers I knew were just embarrassed.

The Transportation Security Administration, that agency created to protect us from who knows what, is an alien entity unto itself, humiliating old ladies and terrifying children. Yet its agents are unable to find the hidden "weapons" sent through the detection process to test their abilities. Are we any safer than we were on that Tuesday morning? It depends on what you call safe. Homeland Security is telling us we should be worried about private planes. Would-be terrorists are still able to drive a car bomb into the middle of New York City.

We have spent the blood of thousands in pointless, expensive wars... for what purpose? Has Iraq turned into the garden of burgeoning democracy we were promised by the Bush administration? Has Afghanistan turned its back on the Taliban?

We have honored the memory of those who perished in the towers, on the planes, in the Pentagon, and in two wars with a completely hamstrung, dysfunctional government. I cannot be the only one repulsed by the grotesque parade of political hate speech that permeates the airwaves and the halls of Congress in equal amounts. We have shelved the rights delineated in the Constitution for a mess of watered-down gruel with no substance.

Thousands of us lost loved ones in the aftermath. Not everyone wants to talk about it, or relive it publicly, or even watch the tributes on TV. Why would we? Those television specials are depressing because they point out that we have accomplished nothing in the years since the attacks.

I prefer to remember the last time I saw Arthur, sitting across from me in the dining room of my parents' house on Long Island. Alive.

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S.J. Schwaidelson is Minnesotan by marriage and New Yorker by birth. She blogs at The Wifely Person Speaks.

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