Lou’s View – September 11, 2014

by Lou Bernard

September 11

It’s funny how we say it. Not funny in the way that, say, Homer Simpson is funny. Funny in the way that a strange noise in the middle of the night is funny. The way we always say it, one noun and one number.

“September 11.”

You never heard anyone ask for elaboration on that. If you ask someone what they remember about September 11, they never ask,”What year?”

Obviously, painfully, we’re always talking about September 11, 2001.

Everyone remembers the day, and it’s a day worth remembering. Here at 232 West Main Street, the Ross Library will have events throughout the day. We’re teaming up with Team RWB to have a day full of history and memory.

I was at the Ross Library when I heard it, thirteen years ago.

I dropped by to check my e-mail, and that was when I’d heard. America had been attacked. A friend told me about it, and then someone e-mailed me five minutes later. It was the morning that America changed—We’d been hurt; we realized we could be hurt.

I’ve written about some of this before. If it sounds a little familiar, forgive me….It’s hard to write about the same event year after year without repeating yourself a bit. But I feel it’s important to remember the day. Also I’d feel stupid if everyone else mentioned it, and I didn’t. (And also, if I say a few things that make you laugh in what should be a serious article, forgive me for that, too. I have my reasons, which I will get to in a few paragraphs.)

At the time, I was running a group of teenagers, and we published a monthly newsletter online. The kids all called me up, asking if there was anything we could do. We went to a candlelight vigil in Triangle Park, and then adjourned to my kitchen and stayed up later working on the newsletter—We didn’t get too many of those “Stop the presses” moments. We had it published the next morning, also from the Ross Library.

“New York is currently looking for blood donations to help the injured,” wrote Vesta Jones, at the time around fourteen years old. And we helped with that, too—The kids all got out of school the next day, and we went down to Saint Agnes Church to help the Red Cross with a blood drive. (The week after September 11, no principal in the country was going to deny a child the right to leave school to work at a blood drive.)

So it was a traumatic time all around. America had been hurt—But we weren’t beaten. And I realized this, of all things, during that week’s episode of Saturday Night Live.

Saturday Night Live is about the closest thing I have to a religion. I watch every week if I can. Immediately after September 11, there was some discussion about whether the show would air—Would it be in bad taste to put on a comedy show so soon after a national tragedy? People had died right down the street, and nobody was sure if it would be an awful thing to have a funny show so soon after.

Rudy Giuliani, New York mayor at the time, put it to rest. He appeared on the show, and gave a short talk about how the show must go on. We couldn’t let them stop us from living our lives. Saturday Night Live is a New York institution, he said, and if it didn’t air, then the terrorists had won.

“Can we be funny?” asked producer Lorne Michaels.

“Why start now?” said Giuliani.

And I realized—We were laughing. It was five days since the tragedy, and we were making jokes on television. And bad taste or not, laughter helps.

They’d attacked us, tried to destroy us—And it hadn’t worked. They’d hurt us, sure. But we were laughing at them. They’d given us their best shot, and we’d taken it, and laughed.

And that was how we, as a nation, began to heal.

So this September 11, come see me at the library. I’ll be there, helping to carry the American flag in remembrance. And if you get a chance, don’t hesitate to have a few laughs with me, too. Because healing has to start someplace.