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Ladder 15 is the only known fire company to have reached the floor of impact on 9/11. My stepdad, Lt Joe Leavey and his men were on their way to WTC when they saw the plane hit the second tower. Without hesitation, he redirected them to tower 2 where they proceeded to run up 78 flights of stairs when so many were running down and out.
Twenty two years later, I am writing and reflecting from Montgomery,AL where I am deepening my understanding/responsibility in the horrific and heartbreaking legacy of slavery. I cant help but think this is another kind of ground zero, one that is demanding a reckoning and reconciliation of epic proportions. While these wounds are markedly different, I can see and feel how the lie of separation and supremacy got us here - a nation wounded many times over and caught up in an endless cycle of violence.
Since 9/11 alone, people of Arab and South Asian descent have been intimidated, surveilled, incarcerated, and killed in exponentially increasing numbers. Military service members have given and taken their lives through suicide. Families have been torn apart through brutal immigration policies and mass incarceration. Millions of Americans have been surveilled and harassed. Black and brown communities have been targeted by racist militarism turned inward through law enforcement. And too many of us have given into a culture of fear, distrust and division. Here's how I wrote about it in American Detox:
Every year on 9/11 we are told to never forget. Society sponsors rituals and ceremonies to commemorate the memory of the almost 3000 people who were lost on that day. We gather at firehouses, mourn in churches and pay our respects at gravestones. But rarely are we asked to remember the millions of Indigenous lives sacrificed for the colonizer’s cause. There is no holiday to reflect on the many Muslims killed in the so-called war on terror. The politics of memory is constructed and contrived. It is the story told by the people who benefit from it. But is that really remembering?
And it leaves me wondering what have we learned from the last 22 years since 9/11, or last 400+ years since the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia or 600+ years since white settlers began colonizing turtle island? Where has violence and militarism gotten us? How do we repair the harm at home and around the world? And how do we create the conditions for true safety and care for all people?
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