Most years I go off social media on 9/11. I really can't stand the memes about never forgetting and blah blah blah. Thousands of people worldwide changed their lives because of the day... or had their lives changed. A once-a-year easy social media post about never forgetting rings hollow to me. I just can't take it.
Today I’m trying something different by being present online on the day… but also by doing my bit to help us chart a different direction for this country than the ones we’ve been heading in since that godawful day.
To that end, today or in the next few days we’ll post both a “Big Shift Guide” and a “Big List of Ideas” to this Substack — to help people do different stuff to shift this country.
Perhaps this year for me and for others the 9/11 anniversary can serve as a pivot point; a jumping-off point; a fork in the road. Perhaps today we can start walking a different path. I, for one, could use that. How about you?
Holding 9/11 Stories, & Why I Avoid The Day
I don't talk about my own 9/11 connections because the people who have told me their stories didn't tell me I could share them all around. But also there's too many.
Working in the world of homeland security post-9/11 and with firefighters and police and also working in the DC area means I've heard sooooooo many stories.
I don't tell my own journey leading up to 9/11 and since because it's just too damn complicated.
Working in the disaster world though I will say I’ve carried the memory of certain things and people to motivate the work. There's a lot of that with 9/11. A lot of things to hold for so many years.
I came across this collected raw footage of 9/11 today. It’s not edited. It’s not cleaned up. It’s just documentation of the day; of the moment:
Sometimes I wonder if the path I’ve chosen for my life has been wise. Because of 9/11 I spent years — years — fighting to advocate on behalf of first responders in this country; and for the public they serve.
When I watch this video, I have zero regrets. None at all. The people I’ve fought for are shown in these shots in full firefighter bunker gear carrying oxygen and firehose walking by the dozens toward certain chaos and possible death. Walking in. Driving in. Showing up. We know now in hindsight that the people in these videos didn’t all make it. We know that.
The scene where I totally lost it watching this is one where you see fire and emergency vehicles just outside a still-standing World Trade Center (WTC) tower in New York City. There are no words.
I carried some of this. I carried it for years. It informed years and years and years of meetings, efforts, fights, advocacy, uncomfortableness, anger, frustration, heartbreak, and the lists just go on. I did some good with it. But a lot of what we were supposed to do and what we tried to do didn’t work. For a lot of reasons, but that’s not the point today. The point is that I carried commitments to these people, and to the ones in DC and the ones on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I carried commitments to the firefighters and police and everyone else who showed up in all three places to literally pick up the pieces and parts of what was blown away. I carried commitments to the public, too, because I thought we wanted a society where we take care of each other. Where people show up in hopefully effective ways to help when crises happen.
I don't know that we ever let go when we make commitments like that. When we decide to advocate for people or a cause… to serve their memory; to serve a cause.
Now
But now our world has changed.
So much of what I tried to do and implement and build after 9/11 with thousands of others for first responders and infrastructure operators and the public is important.
But now some of the biggest threats come from inside this country.
We’ve got threats but we’ve also got vulnerabilities… and one of them is that we’re totally not dealing with the threats head-on.
We have an active culture war and a fractured, unhealthy society with a threadbare social fabric. Like for example, it turns out that maybe a lot of the public don’t actually find it important that we take care of each other. Since the pandemic (and the guns, and the explosion of hate, etc., etc.) we’ve seen that taking care of humans is not a moral imperative shared by everyone up in this country. We’re mostly ignoring public health, and in many cases people are actively blocking disease spread mitigation measures. All of that is a pretty serious values issue.
We are allowing firearms to proliferate on top of that. We have intensifying climate disasters, coming changes in migration, and ecological change happening right before our eyes.
What’s Coming
There will be huge changes because of competition for food and water, because of the changing availability of those things, because of increasingly fierce fights for those things, because of wealth gaps and a rise in authoritarianism, and because the most powerful are going to try and take and hold as much power and as many resources as they can through all of this.
What we’re seeing with a Republican attempt to seize and hold power no matter the cost to democracy and to our social cohesion is an early indicator of what we’re likely to see worldwide as everything intensifies.
Yet — We Have Options
It's all quite spectacular… and we don't seem to be doing much at all about any of it at scale and in a coordinated or strategic way.
I think we can though.
I think we can step it up…. in terms of strategy, in terms of coordination, and in terms of our collective moral conscience. I think we have unexplored options.
While it’s pretty brazen to say that, I think we're going to need to get more brazen.
I think we've got a pretty good framework at Shift The Country to help us do some good — at scale.
What I did after 9/11 is I left my fabulous, amazing, fun career in wildland fire to help build a big national system to help us deal with emergencies better; like how the US wildfire community does. I also worked on helping us get more resilient as a country from a big catastrophe and big disaster perspective.
I saw what worked and what took... and what didn't work and what didn't take.
A lot of painful lessons. A lot of frustration. But I saw some good as well. I saw some things take hold and get stronger.
There are ways to change society.
There are ways to anchor ideas and approaches; and to spread them. There are ways to build consensus; to get buy-in. There are ways to evolve and to change how we do things.
You start by having a plan. A strategy. A vision.
And then you go after it.
You follow the plan. Step-by-step.
It's not a pipe dream. It's not impossible.
A Road Map For This New Path
So how do we walk this new path?
As I mentioned in the opening, very shortly we’ll be posting a “Big Shift Guide” with some options to help us navigate this fast-evolving risk landscape... and to help us make change from within it. That guide will go with a “Big List of Ideas” to help people and groups get started taking us down a different path.
We can make a road map with those two pieces plus the 5 Things that give us an overall strategy.
We can chart a new direction in this country… place by place and group by group.
What Will We Carry?
What will we carry into the future… for this country, and for all of our people?
After 9/11, I carried the stories of so many people. I carried the thought of people jumping out of windows and falling to the ground because that was less awful than whatever hell they were facing inside the WTC buildings.
I carried the stories of the people who ran in to help; not knowing whether or not they would make it out. Some did. Many didn't.
We're in a different situation today.
We're in a whole-of-society threat situation.
I don't think we understand what's coming. What's coming is not going to go well. It's going to make 9/11 look tiny.
But we can do things to help it all go better in the places where we live... and overall. We can do things to help make it less bad.
We can do some things to actually change the direction as well.
Some of it we won't be able to affect. There will be tragedy. There will be lots of things outside of our sphere of influence or impact.
But there are going to be lots of things we can impact and effect. There will be lots of humans we can help. There will be systems and institutions we can change and tweak and evolve and transform.
There will be hearts and minds as well. There always are. We have our humanity. We can do more with that. We can do more because of that.
We can shift our moral compass. Our national zeitgeist. Our country's conscience.
We can reweave the social fabric. Perhaps in little tiny pieces… but we can do it. We can build connection and community where we are… and then we can work out from there.
What we can carry as we go forward into this work is the vision of who we can be and what we can do as a society.
We can lean forward and carry what we want to see. What we intend to see. What we are going to build.
Maybe we don't have to carry the death and destruction of tragedy to motivate our work, but rather... big vision.
Big vision with shining humanity and taking care of humans and building a flourishing, thriving society even in the midst of such great challenge… because there are ways to do that even as everything changes all around us.
We have to actually try and do it though.
We can.
Admitting that this tough, intimidating risk landscape is where we are is a good start. We're not good at seeing disaster. Even on 9/11, the TV news anchors did not know how to describe or deal with what they were seeing unfold before them. Because it was so freaking unbelievable.
We're there now with the state of our world. It’s absolutely breathtakingly freaking unbelievable. Our media are definitely also not accurately describing it; nor are our elected leaders. Yet we need to see it for what it is.
Time for some paradigm shifts.
Honoring Those Who Came Before With What We Do Next
This year it’s 22 years since 9/11. That day in 2001 was a pivot — for the world. For a zillion reasons.
Today can be a pivot, too. Any day can. Sometimes we can pick when we decide to have change happen. Why not now?
For me, today is a pivot. It's a pivot into walking a different path; taking a fork in the road. Walking a path where we chart out a tricky future together… and go about making changes in the world around us in the midst of coming chaos. It’s a path where we build from the ground up. It’s a path where we strengthen our connections, our communities, and our coalitions. We build out from there.
We have options. Let's use them.
When we do that, we honor everyone who helped us get here to this point. We build on what has been built before us. We take the fights further.
We hold the vision that has persisted… through decades and wars and strife and violence and deep injustice. We hold the dreams of what we can be or who we could be. We hold the dreams of those who couldn't take those dreams any further.
We can.
We can take the dream further… and then we can hand it off when we’ve done what we could.
For me, that's how we honor this day; 9/11. That's how we honor everything that came after 9/11, too. That’s how we honor everyone before us who did some good for this country and for it’s people. And that's how we honor those who will come after us as well.
We take what they’ve done, we build on it, and we move it forward.
We can.
We absolutely can. When someone tries to tell you otherwise… maybe think of the dozens of FDNY firefighters on 9/11 walking fully loaded down down blocks of a street toward certain chaos — because that’s what was the right thing to do in the moment. Because they signed up to help… so they showed up to help.
We can, too.
Be well and be safe. Look after your people. Look after yourself.
We have a long and complicated road ahead of us, but it exists.
Let's walk it.
And let's work on our big dreams of who we can be and what we can do as we go.
We need us.
Save for budding engineers, building construction trades, NYC World Trade Towers insiders details. Complicated. I'm curious learner https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/11/19/the-tower-builder-world-trade-center-attacks?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_SundayArchive_091023&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5c6fa4080564ce1f642f0bf9&cndid=56509468&hasha=a6c6f5964dc20458efb87f390acd3650&hashb=ec11971196360d9df133a5550864997ea57ffd98&hashc=cd10bc035a4125747ea21bc56ea9010ae6aa2d3401090ac9f1ba2b5717c64850&esrc=NL_page&mbid=mbid%3DCRMNYR012019&utm_term=TNY_SundayArchive