Sept. 11 has changed our lives. The Ad Council played an ad Sept. 11 that showed a row of houses in an average neighborhood, and the voice over explained, “On Sept. 11 terrorists tried to change America forever.” The screen fades, then comes back up, each house bedecked with at least a couple of American flags each. “Well, they succeeded.” This ad may have made us feel patriotic on that first Patriot Day, but, is that distracting from the real ways we all have changed?
Last Friday three medical students in two cars sped through a toll booth in Naples, Fla. without paying the toll. They received a ticket, but not from a state trooper. The students were released from federal custody soon after what was called “the most expensive traffic violation in Florida law enforcement history,” according to The Miami Herald.
Why were federal authorities involved in the petty toll booth brush off? Why were three United States citizens trekking from Chicago to South Miami for medical training the cause of such high interest?
These three students are all of Middle Eastern descent. A woman at a restaurant in Georgia was giving them the hairy eyeball, and so the three made flip comments about vowing to make America “cry on 9/13.”
Is saying something like that, even in jest, is that like screaming “FIRE!” in a crowded theater? What if the men had been of other lineage? Of course there are many famous white guy terrorists as well, but if Timothy McVeigh was sitting in a diner 10 years ago saying to a friend, “if we can’t pull this off, I have contacts,” would anyone care?
Now, obviously it wasn’t very smart for these young men to do that, because the woman, already paranoid as evidenced by her watching them, called the authorities. The students will be referred to Georgia where this original “tip” was made to face prosecution, however, there were no bombs, or other dangerous materials inside the vehicles.
What about the West Nile virus? Sen. Patrick Leahy seems to think that mosquitoes are part of a terrorist plot. 54 people have died of the virus so far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s several times more than the number who died of anthrax.
Are we paranoid? Or is the anniversary of Sept. 11 making us hypersensitive to our surroundings? There are people on this campus who are afraid that if their name gets in the paper, even in a favorable light, they might get their visas taken away. Insurance rates have gone up on apartment buildings in reaction to Sept. 11, in turn making rents increase. The housing crunch has never been so bad at USM, and Portland is barely affordable.
Covering Sept. 11 as a news entity is difficult. How do we do it? How much is too much? We have to cover it. It is big news. It is important. It is history. We all saw magazines on racks at the supermarket, or news magazines on TV. They all covered it. There was no way we could not have. In recent memory I can’t think of another event that shared every aspect of our lives, from the cover of US News and World Report to Sports Illustrated to Better Homes and Gardens. We covered the events on campus, taking photos and relaying accounts back to you, to help us all remember where we were one year later. What we will tell our grandchildren when they read on this in U.S. History?
On Sept. 12 2001, there was complete oversaturation. We were unable to escape, watching the planes destroy the buildings so many times, people flinging themselves from top floors. A year later, we have a choice of watching it, listening to it, reading it, or changing the channel, flipping the page. And yet, we go back. We decide how much is enough, as consumers of news. We all do what we need to in order to remember and observe. The country has changed: we have changed in that this memory is stuck in our minds forever, impossible to be erased.