Shrinking the Wolf

My mind can sometimes be a projectionist's fever dream as a panoply of cross-generational imagery, historical, hysterical, some mine and some from before my time, coalesce and collide unbidden and unwanted. I can't watch, but I can't look away either.

There's a photo from the Spanish Civil War, depicting the moment of death of a Loyalist soldier whose name I did not know for decades. It's chased by the jumpy, silent footage of Zapruder's film as President Kennedy's head explodes from the impact of a bullet.

There are the grainy picture postcards from a long-ago, hard-fought and hastily forgotten war (though not by those who were sent to fight it), the first of one man executing another, while in the second, a naked child literally runs for her life.

All of those images pale when recalling street-level video of a brilliantly blue heaven over a lower Manhattan skyline on September 11, 2001 and the startling and sudden appearance of a commercial airliner entering one of the Twin Towers about two thirds of the way up, disappearing inside, forever, while the mind struggles to process what the eyes and neural network have shared. And there's this one that breaks my heart every time I look at it.

Who among us doesn't have a story about where they were when they first learned of the attacks on 9/11? Nearly every story that can be told by this, the twenty-fourth anniversary of those attacks, has been told. The shock and horror never dull, no matter how often the tale is told. It sometimes felt as if history stopped at the moment when the first plane impacted. And when time began again, the Age of Innocent Ignorance was over, and that of the Dark Hard World had begun.

The attacks of 9/11 created for every American, regardless of race, creed, politics, sexual persuasion, or color, including those not yet born, a shared memory in which pre 9/11 America becomes almost mythical.

As often as we speak about the way we were before 9/11, there's a strange quiet when we talk of what has happened in its wake. We talk in abstractions about the Global War on Terror and of the thousands and tens of thousands of men and women in uniform deployed across the world in defense of freedoms we too often take for granted here on the home front.

We'll offer thoughts for the victims of 9/11, but to better understand the price of freedom, perhaps we should visit the memorial at Chelsea Parade to remember the selfless service and sacrifice of Norwich residents Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

Their memorial is just a few steps from Norwich Free Academy, where both were students. In such a way does the circle remain unbroken in remembering two young men who ran towards, not from, danger when their nation most needed them because they realized courage is not the absence of fear, but, rather, something more important than fear.

There's a German proverb, "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." There are already too many wolves in our world without creating more. As Franklin Roosevelt offered to a very different America in a very perilous time, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

We honor Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, not just today, the anniversary of 9/11, but every day, by living fearlessly and out loud and to help one another become better people.

-bill kenny