Remembering 9/11 at UC Berkeley

In 2001 I was a freshman living in the dorms at UC Berkeley. My roommate Kelvin was a video game junkie, and habitually nocturnal, so when the blaring sound of our mini-television woke me up at 8am and Kelvin, sitting up at his desk, said something about the White House being under attack, I assumed I was dreaming and promptly went back to sleep. An hour later, just like any other day, my alarm clock went off and I jumped into some clothes and ran to my 9am class: introductory Arabic. I was one of three or four people to attend class that day. Our TA said there would be no lesson and he opened the floor for people to talk about what had just happened. No one spoke. Basil, the president of the Muslim Student Union, immediately excused himself. Daila, a second generation Lebanese American girl, usually tough as nails, broke down crying. I was too shocked to really process what was going on.
It was Tuesday, September 11th.
That night the university and student government arranged a candlelight vigil. Campus and community leaders made solemn speeches, poets read freshly penned poems, local musicians with acoustic guitars strapped over their backs sang hushed mournful songs, and students conveyed their personal stories in raw heartbroken voices. Everyone spoke of loss, of history, of identity and nationhood. An estimated two thousand people attended that evening vigil on Sproul Plaza at the heart of our university. When the chancellor called for a minute of silence to remember the dead, two thousand people fell silent. Across the campus, bells tolled the hour from the top of the clock tower. It would be the last time that year that the campus came together in Sproul Plaza over a common purpose.
In the following days, talk of war spread like wildfire, anger was quick to supplant grief, and fear settled in the pits of people’s stomachs. The Muslim Student Union worked frantically to dispel misconceptions about Muslims and Islam, and they filled whole lecture halls for their informational teach-ins, discussions with panels of experts, and open forum question and answer sessions. But no matter how positive the reception, many Muslims in the community feared a backlash of hate crimes and Islamophobia, and an informal door to door nighttime escort service was established out of the apartments of the MSA board of directors.
I attended the first two meetings of the Anti-War Coalition. There were shouting matches about best methods to organize and to mobilize, peppered with academic abstractions, pats on the back, personal insults, and anti-establishment tirades. It took two hours for a room crammed with people overflowing into the hallway to agree to separate into specialized committees and complete their separate tasks individually. The second general meeting was noticeably smaller and more radicalized.
If the Anti-War Coalition (later renamed the Stop the War Coalition) could be loosely considered a coalition of liberals and the left, then there must have been a similar process occurring among the campus’ conservatives and the right because no sooner had the coalition organized a series of protests than a series of counter-protests broke out from the right. Soon protests and counter-protests went on simultaneously. Hundreds gathered with signs and slogans and colored armbands to champion their various chosen causes. One side chanted stop the war, only to be shouted down by support our troops, to be answered by war is murder, to be interrupted by God Bless America.
Couldn’t we have agreed that civilian deaths are always an atrocity, that whether we agree with the mission or not we all want our fellow countrymen to come home safely, that you can be proud of your country and critical of its policies all at the same time?
Even without the protests to spark debate, individuals broke into spontaneous argument on Sproul Plaza, and crowds would gather to watch or contribute or heckle. Some days I missed dinner because I was down on Sproul Plaza listening to budding intellectuals and activists spar over everything from Zionism to civil disobedience. Occasionally I got into arguments of my own, usually in the backgrounds of protests when some passing remark overheard from a stranger hit a nerve with me. I think most of us acted not with the interests of rational discourse in mind, but out of a need to lash out, to expel a nervous energy that made people on both sides weep without reason at night, skip classes to watch the news behind locked doors at home, or publicly berate a complete stranger on the flimsiest of pretexts.
There was no shortage of controversy. The anthrax mailing attacks followed weeks after September 11th; five people died and several fell ill without any clear motive or explanation from authorities, and people began to fear their mail. The Patriot Act was passed in late October; professors watched what they said in lecture, students were mindful of the books they checked out of the library, and casual questions became a cause for suspicion. Fear gave substance to the rumors that more terrorist attacks were eminent, that civil liberties around the world would be trampled on in the name of national security, that an emerging draconian police state would make entire populations disappear into internment camps, that this would be the flashpoint to ignite a new world war.
Though history has proven some of our worst misgivings false and proven others true, at the time they were all equally real. I think that when the twin towers fell, it disrupted a sense of order that we had previously thought infallible, and as the world was righting itself, as people were reorienting themselves, for a moment anything was possible and we had every reason to expect the worst. I don’t know where I was in all that. I think I retreated to more manageable pursuits: classes and exams, friends and college life. I have the impression that I was in a daze, that things were changing too fast for me to keep up.
I’d like to say that one day everything made sense again, that somehow the plain and diverse faces of common courage banished the terror that had quietly taken root in our social consciousness. People prefer that stories end on brave tenacious notes of hope and optimism. But today as I reflect on the thousands of lives lost on American soil all those years ago, and the countless other lives lost or irrevocably changed by the global political, cultural and military fallout from that day, I don’t feel like trumping up a positive way to close this piece.
The culture of fear that pervaded immediately after 9/11 was simply absorbed into the white noise of everyday life. The moral dilemmas of the War on Terror and its accompanying paradigms remain unresolved. But from another point of view, the world has always been this way, was always going to become what it has become, and the only difference is that for me and so many others my age, that day and its aftermath has served as an inevitable wakeup call to hard, ever-present realities.
This story doesn’t have a happy ending, I think. So let's just say that in the end we woke up, that there was much to be done for our common future, and God willing a host of humble paths for a multitude of peoples to get there. That is all I can think to say.