nmah6377.xml

nmah6377.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-12-04

I woke up in my dorm room in Moscow Idaho and saw the news on CNN. I had World History class that morning and before the professor walked in we all tried to find the news on the class TV, but there was no cable, so all we got was a fuzzy rendering of the kid show Teletubbies. We turned it off and waited in silence. Dr. Kittell gave a short speech, the kind every historian now dreams they gave that day (lesprit d'escalier I guess.) She told us that we could cancel class, we could go home and watch the news, but thats exactly what these attackers wanted us to do, the best way to recover our spirit was to refuse to let these attacks disrupt our daily life and our study of history. Then she spoke about how our country must not stagnate with the lust for revenge, how we must instead improve our foreign relations, our conscientiousness to other nations, and how our state should educate our citizens to think globally not just within the limits of nationalism. For the same reason none of my history professors canceled class that day. Still I could hardly concentrate.
The student union had set up a projector in the main dinning hall. So many students gathered around staring. I immediately wanted to paint this image of a hundred faces watching the same thing; I bought a plastic camera and snapped a few shots from every side. By an odd coincidence the police were chasing someone outside who ran into the student union, where they tackled and arrested him. Nobody knew what it all meant. I got a few pictures, and have never heard about the case since.

Walking back to the dorm that evening I tried to remember what Foucaults thoughts were about power and society, but it was over my head at the time. I looked up at the sky; there wasnt a single white jet trail, perhaps for the first time in decades. I thought about my father back home in Grangeville, I wondered if he was still flying since it was a busy fire season (hes a forward air observer on forest fires.) That day the little strip at Grangeville Air Center was the busiest non-military airport in the United States.

Since September 11 I am more devoted than ever to the pursuit of history. Had we studied ourselves a little more before 9/11, perhaps we would have thought beyond capitalism, border security, and defense budgets, to the lives around the globe that our every action affects. Perhaps we could have seen this coming.
But a historian should never play what if.
I am not saying that it is our governments fault that these murderers came upon us. It is the fault of ignorance that breeds ignorance.

We must remember that it made many people learn to love life, and cherish one another.

I flew the flag, and I wonder what the future historian thinks of this symbol and our little post-modern world. To me, the American Flag is a great symbol of freedom beyond the scope of nationalism. If we lose sight of what true freedom means, then our flag will become nothing more than a label of boundaries on a map. And no country lasts forever.
We must remember that.