DĂ©jĂ -Vu, After 15 Years
First period World History. Ninth grade. A hot, muggy Tuesday morning, as Miami mornings tend to be. No rain or clouds in the sky, though; just bright sun illuminating the classrooms and outside corridors. We had been assigned classwork, though nobody particularly cared much, and everyone was busy chatting about their week. Our teacher was preoccupied with something on his desk, not bothering to quell the din. The phone rings, he answers, then announces over the hubbub, "The World Trade Center has been bombed." (That was the first version of the story we got.)
What I remember most about that morning was the instant silence in that room; you could hear a pin drop. Students silently opening their laptops and connecting to every news outlet possible. Most of the class trekking next door to the English teacher's classroom that had a TV on. (No hope of actual school from thenceforth.) As the details became clearâan airplane being flown into the first tower, then another, then the Pentagon, then rumors of more planes possibly being hijackedâour concern turned to horror. About seven months prior, many of my classmates had visited New York and Washington, DC, and seen both monuments on a class trip (I had been unable to join them). Memories of my own, growing up in New York and seeing the Twin Towers regularly, came flooding back, much as memories tend to behave upon the loss of a friend or a loved one.
Fast forward fourteen years. Friday the 13th of November, 2015. Friday the Thirteenth is uncommon enough that I take note of it when it happens. Still, I had tickets to a football match that night, so I promised myself a good time. I was living in Belgium then; I had a postdoc at the University of Leuven, and it seemed like a good time to leave American soil for a bit. The world had changed. The Bush administration, though long gone, had left an indelible mark on the face of the world. The Middle East was unrecognizable anymore, and that region and the US had become entangled in an involuntary dance, impossible to talk about one without raising the specter of the other. A certain billionaire had announced his candidacy for president and by then was running on a platform that welcomed feelings that America had worked hard for fifty years to rid itself of yet were now being given a microphone. Tensions were high, pitting family against family, friend against friend. Yes, it was a good time to get away for a bit.
That Friday night, a friend and I were at Roi Baudouin Stadium in Brussels, watching the Belgian Red Devils play Italy. A few minutes in, a swarm of orange-vested security personnel suddenly entered the stadium from multiple entrances. Some of us raised our eyebrows, but Italy had scored early, and given the history of Italian fans in that stadium (cf. 1985 Heysel Disaster), we assumed that the security personnel were there for extra crowd control, just in case. The majority of the crowd continued to root for the home team, pleading for the likes of Kevin de Bruyne and Jan Vertonghen to score (they did), eventually cheering Belgiumâs victory. What we did not know was that suicide bombers had just attacked the Stade de Franceânot 90 minutes away by trainâduring a France-Germany friendly. It was not until we boarded the train home that news of the scale of the ISIS coordinated attack in Paris unfolded from our mobile devices.
That night was the first time I felt a strange sense of dĂ©jĂ -vu. I remembered the feelings that arose after 9/11: confusion, horror, anger, and hate, in that order. I remembered the stories that arose the week after the attacks: people being targeted for looking like âthe culpritsâ. An administration preying on the anger and the pain of a people who just took a scourging, answering violence with violence. Our sense of human trust violated so completely that it will be a long time in returning, if it ever should.
But perhaps most of all, I could not shake the feeling that I was being targeted personally because I, along with my own people, embody a culture and values that another culture finds so offensive that they have declared war on it. It is nothing new: just look at history. But 9/11 was the first time that I, perhaps unwillingly, felt part of a bigger nation, a bigger sum, as someone responsible for my own values. I had the right to be happy and the responsibility to just beâand it was this responsibility that made another culture hate me for it. We were hated because we could, in fact, just be, no baggage allowed.
I remember encountering many of the same feelings from people around me in Europe after the Paris attacks. The dĂ©jĂ -vu grew stronger after Brussels went on lockdown, and especially after the city itself became the target of an ISIS attack four months later. Many other European cities have fallen prey since. This time, though, the feeling has lingered. The unity that was there after 9/11 hasnât really prevailed. Maybe thatâs why the feelings had not returned before: the solidarity we had in the days after New York and Washington was a balm, numbing the pain. It helped us forget, forget that it could happen again. We donât have that luxury anymore. Now, whenever I see or hear of another hate-filled attack on a fellow human, however small, the dĂ©jĂ -vu strikes again because itâs nothing new, because itâs the same as that September morning fifteen years ago: I no longer have the luxury of ignoring the humanity lost. It is up to us to change that.
Let us kiss the dĂ©jĂ -vu goodbye. Let's celebrate our humanity and stop hating others for theirs. We became more human after 9/11, or at least we were reminded of it. Somehow we lost it along the way. Let's not forget that humanity gained. Itâs not up to politics: it starts with the little things. Choices. When we encounter someone who is so different from us that we canât comprehend it, we have a choice of how to respond. Choose wisely: you never know how many lives you can save with a simple âHelloâ and âThank youâ.
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