By Rawlins Gilliland
Dallas, TX – It is odd how the most gregarious of us can become the most private when the pain should seemingly be shared. But I have neither felt comfort from talking about what has happened, nor successfully sought the connective tissue of collective American grief. I have remained alone, stayed busy, doing inconsequential duties at home, like cleaning out the refrigerator, or straightening a cluttered closet.
I found myself cooking eggs with Cat Chow for the stray feral cats that hover near my door daily. Watching these young and hungry cats devour my feline cuisine has made me smile. And some of them have let me touch them. And two let me even pick them up and hold them. All animals need love and the comfort of being held affectionately when life gets cold and real.
I think about those younger than I am, those in their 20s, 30s, even 40s. They are from a generation that had never known a truly life-changing national news event. Rather than JFK being assassinated, they come from a time when, a time where, it has been more the People Magazine-type shared grief: the death of John Lennon, Princess Diana, or JFK Jr. But those are ghastly events, not historical sagas. Yes, these people younger than I had the space shuttle Challenger and Lockerbie, Columbine, even Oklahoma City. But they also had the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of communism. They have seen the triumph of good - and good times. They have never seen nor felt full-blown indelible proof of how evil people can rob you of a point of view, an idea, an ideal, a frame of mind.
Now we join as one family. A family whose members know all too clearly what it is to grieve for something far larger than ourselves. The 'Me' generation just became part of the before-and-after world, where nostalgia will have its birthplace, and cynicism could find its inception.
More importantly, what else we may see in this postpartum emerging American world will be a change of values, for however long, no less real. No one who has watched and listened to this news coverage can see their personal priorities as staid and unassailable. In the place of yesterday's presumptuous emphasis on the material, and the false accoutrements of status, we may now not only go places; we might actually discover the ability to see places and feel places, and re-emerge as creatures fleetingly glimpsing the beautiful and painful mysteries that are the all-too-brief life experience.
We have always known, intellectually, how fragile is the fabric of our lives. But these realizations have remained visual, more of the eye than of the soul - as when we see a cross on the side of a highway, when we pass a car wreck, or attend a funeral. It is just that, now, the knowledge we have always subverted has become instantaneously primal.
If we can use this knowledge well, and share the result of its expanded significance to the American psyche, in actions rather than just words; if we can remember, if we can, if we can - it could well be the most genuine of gifts to an American generation and to us all, by those who died on September 11th, 2001.
Rawlins Gilliland is a former National Endowment Poet in Residence.