An American in Canada Explains
Last year on September 11th, I awoke with a mouth full of ash. I discovered this anomaly when, after brushing my teeth, I spit a chalky, dark gray stream into my bathroom sink. Stunned, I pressed my face close to the mirror, said “ahh,” and extended a tongue that was as black as chimney soot. At that instant, I remembered it was the anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. Then I shivered with a strange epiphany. “My God,” I thought, “those attacks have made us all into cannibals.”
When the World Trade Center’s towers crumbled to the ground, nearly 2800 individuals disintegrated into plumes of smoke and ash. The dust that blanketed lower Manhattan contained not only the asbestos which seared the lungs of relief workers, but also the microscopic remains of our fellow human beings. In the middle of my blurry-eyed morning routine, this sudden awareness inspired a frantic ten-minute scraping session which restored my tongue to its natural color. Once my shock receded, however, I began to find comfort in this idea.
I realized that since 9/11 traces of flesh, blood and bone have migrated to the most remote corners of the world. Because these specks of humanity have inevitably slipped into our hair, our eyes and our mouths, countless people now carry an internal memorial to those lost individuals. This belief transforms seemingly innocuous occurrences—a sneeze in London, a cough in Cairo, a woman wiping dirt from her forehead in Kyoto—into moments when those victims silently implore us not to forget their unexpected sacrifice.
Three and a half years after that infamous day, and just a few weeks after the process for identifying the victims’ remains reached its conclusion in New York, such an intimate and nauseating image of our interconnectedness is becoming increasingly necessary. Regardless of how you may feel about America’s intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no denying that the international solidarity which followed the attacks has since disappeared. For a brief moment the world united in the glow of memorial candles; today it is divided into coalitions of the “willing” and the “unwilling.”
The Bush Administration’s declaration that the countries of the world are either “with [America] or with the terrorists” continues to demean the contributions to peace and safety that others have made. Such arrogance has irreparably estranged allies and left ordinary people feeling contempt for the United States and its citizens.
As an American living in Canada—a country that continues to play a vital role in Afghanistan but did not support the war in Iraq—I have witnessed the effects firsthand. I hear it in the mornings when I dress to the “we told you so” tone of the CBC’s war coverage, and it chokes me at night when I hesitate to mention my nationality in front of the strangers I meet in Montreal’s smoke-filled bars. If Canada’s decision not to participate in the proposed U.S. missile-defense shield still perplexes some American officials, they need look no further than the average Canadian’s overwhelming opposition to the project.
September 11, 2001 may have made us all into unwilling cannibals, but since that day far too many people have acquired a taste for blood. The need to respond has mutated into what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the “descending spiral” of violence. For those who believe in the downward cyclicality of hate, the smirks of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib were not shocking; they were merely an eerie echo of the cheering Middle Eastern radicals who dance across the nightly news in celebration of pain, death and chaos. Ultimately, it is difficult to claim that the terrorists failed when America has entered into that cycle, its citizens killing and dying every day in foreign deserts. January elections in Iraq were a step in the right direction, but in reality there is no end in sight to the occupation and thus to the bloodshed.
Looking back on my bathroom miracle, what is most shocking to me is that I did not seek a logical, physical explanation for my tongue’s blackness. Instead I assumed I had been blessed, singled out for a unique moment of perspicacity. Later that afternoon, however, my wife informed me that the Pepto Bismol tablets I had taken the previous night were the source of the discoloration. She had read on the internet that this household remedy contains bismuth which, when combined with traces of sulfur in the intestines, can cause a harmless and temporary darkening of the tongue and mouth.
This dose of reality reminded me that a belief in our own exceptionalism is almost always an illusion, and in the post-9/11 world, these pretensions are not only misguided but dangerous as well. Nevertheless, as another anniversary passes, those tragic events retain an uncanny ability to reveal our interconnectedness in the most unlikely of places. Perhaps one day, they will help us to find peace amongst the ashes of the Twin Towers.