Reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of 9/11

Had there not been such an onslaught of media coverage, I might not have remembered 9/11 this year, as I didn’t last because of Covid and the wildfires. Most years, I at least make a mental note, some I spend time thinking about how the 2000 Presidential election truly was stolen and how that helped lead to the devastating and destructive ramifications that followed September 11, 2001 – the increased surveillance state, Guantanamo Bay and the unlawful detention of hundreds of primarily innocent Muslims, the U.S. government’s open support of torture, the wrongful invasion of Iraq and all its casualties, the war with Afghanistan and all its casualties, and the extreme Islamophobia that has continued. I also have the personal memories of that day, which I now cherish and hold close, as both my parents have passed and my connection to my home in Montana has been severed in a way that is deeply painful.

I was in Montana visiting my family. I’d spent several days at my dad’s in the Beartooth Mountains outside of Red Lodge. The night of September 10th, I remember a moose coming up to the window and peering into the room I was sleeping; my dad’s home was right next to the Bear Creek River and there were often moose and bears who would visit. The morning of September 11th, I got up at 5:30am to get ready so I could drive my dad to work in Billings, an hour away. I needed to borrow his car to drive to Bozeman to review the exhibition Weapons That Changed the West from Flint to Fusion at the Museum of the Rockies for Stretcher.org, the online arts publication I had co-founded with a group of artists and writers four months earlier. We left the cabin at 6:30 and were on the road listening to NPR when we heard ‘breaking news’ that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. My dad’s first reaction was "Oh my god, we’re under attack, I need to call Sande” (my dad’s brother was a senior intelligence officer with the CIA). My first response was, “It might have been an accident”; as we were arguing back and forth over this and listening to the news, the second plane hit. We sat in silence trying to grasp what was happening.

Looking out the window at the Bear Creek River from my dad’s home

I dropped my dad off at work and stopped at an internet cafe to check my email before heading to Bozeman, two hours away, as planned. The experience driving on I-90 was incredibly eerie. As I drove through the stunning panorama of the Rocky Mountains, grassy plains, and an endless blue sky, I felt an overwhelming cognitive dissonance as the landscape around me felt so peaceful, while I listened to the coverage of the towers collapsing and people screaming as they ran through the streets of New York. I didn’t see another car on the highway for at least half an hour, adding a post-apocalyptic edge to the experience.

Once I arrived in Bozeman, I had lunch at the Bacchus Pub. Everything seemed pretty normal. There were folks sitting around the Bar talking about the attacks, but they could also have been talking about a football game. I got to the museum around 1pm, and like the Bacchus, everything seemed strangely normal. I went in and spent three hours walking through the exhibition, taking 32 pages of notes. This was the curatorial statement:

As much as weapons represent the taking of life, they also represent the preservation of it through hunting, conservation, and defense. Of course history is not so simple, and through the eyes of the Blackfeet facing genocide, or townspeople and ranchers living at “ground zero,” modern weapons take on terrible implications.

Why the inclusion of distant wars? The connections are as complex as history itself, the economies of fur or copper, the politics of Cuba or the war of 1812. With the deepest regrets and highest honors, Montanans have always distinguished themselves - in the Meuse -Argonne or la Drang Valley with the tenacity of hunters raised in the wilderness and an ancient warrior ethic.

We hope this exhibit will expose viewers to new facts, concepts, and understanding, and inspire each visitor to ask further about the history and the future of the great place we call home.

- David Swingle, Richard Galli, Curators

This exhibit is a broad overview of Montana’s environmental, social, technological, and geopolitical history using weapons as a medium.

Today I am thinking deeper. I’m thinking about the history of the United States and how 9/11 fits so perfectly into the country’s true origin story – not the bullshit liberty and justice for all or the façade of freedom. I’m thinking about the manipulation, the lies, the cruelty, the sense of entitlement to manipulate, to lie, and to commit acts of cruelty, torture, and murder – as long as it’s in the interests of the privileged, and in this country, primarily privileged white men. I’m thinking about how that day has been given such importance as a symbol of terror and the worst of humanity, yet the United States has been a symbol of terror and the embodiment of the worst of humanity since its founding on the soil of the stolen land it inhabits – and long before by the settler colonizers who stole it from the indigenous peoples who were and still are the respectful and rightful stewards of the land. That sentiment is not out of disrespect for those who died on 9/11 or their loved ones who are still experiencing pain and suffering as a result of a cruel act of terrorism – I fully recognize the severity of what happened. However, it not any worse than the acts of terrorism that the United States has and continues to inflict on its own citizens and on those of other countries.

In truth, today is just like any other day for the United States, except that a lot more resources have been directed towards its mythology.