Student remembers 9/11, reacts to recent Churchill lecture
By Stacey R. Hamman
Tuesday marked the sixth year since the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. For freshman Maria McClintock, who was born in Lynchburg and raised in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, the familiar date was enough to trigger a flashback.
"I'd been thinking about it actually - for the past couple of days - that 9/11 was coming up, and that it would be a Tuesday just like it was in '01," McClintock said. "Every time I looked at the date, I would see something. It would just hit me."
On Sept. 11, 2001, McClintock was attending class as a student of the Genesis program, a middle
school within Xaverian High School, in Bay Ridge, New York. Her school overlooked New York Harbor.
Between the first and second attacks, students in McClintock's seventh-grade history class were standing around when a girl in the group said the World Trade Center had fallen, she said.
"I remember saying, 'They can never fall,' " McClintock said.
Fifty people who had been immediate graduates of Xaverian had been in the buildings, McClintock said. The high school erected a memorial and a plaque "to all the Sept. 11 victims that were alumni of the Xaverian," she said.
"We always had something to commemorate it, to remember it," McClintock said. "Almost all New York City schools do, as do New Jersey schools, Connecticut schools, and - I'm pretty sure – Pennsylvania schools. Most of the ones that I know about do. They at least have a moment of silence."
It was a shock to come to VCU, McClintock said, where there was no formal response, or seemingly, any service made available to affected students on Sept. 11.
"If a student (was) experiencing a reaction to a traumatic event, we would be available to see them immediately," said Jihad Aziz, director of University Counseling Services.
McClintock searched last week for any Sept. 11 commemorative events scheduled to take place on campus, but there was no mention of the anniversary in any VCU-administered medium.
"I never found it," she said. "And that actually, really offended me." McClintock said she later discovered that political activist Ward Churchill had come to speak at the University Student Commons last Friday.
Churchill's comments in a September 2001 essay stated that the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks weren't innocent, and McClintock found the hiring of the speaker considerably offensive. After seeing Churchill's face emblazoned on the front page of Monday's Commonwealth Times, she flipped to the article about him, which mentioned Churchill's controversial statements.
"(Those who died on Sept. 11) weren't innocent? How were they not innocent? They were doing their jobs. They were going to work. They were living their lives," she said. "He doesn't know what it was like. He didn't know what it was like to live in fear and to not know what was happening, to not know what was happening to the people he loved the most.
"The school should be commemorating the events that have occurred that have changed the course of American history," McClintock said. "Think about how many things have happened because of 9/11: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq. How many things have changed just because of this one event?"
Most people do not remember Sept. 11, McClintock said. "They weren't there, they don't know what happened … It showed our vulnerability and our complacency. A major weakness in our country was shown, and we're falling into that same trap," she said. "It's something that influenced so many people, and to not even keep their memory alive - it's as if they died for no reason."
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
McClintock says "it's as if they died for no reason." She seems to think that just because some people don't remember 9/11 the way she remembers it that we don't remember it at all. If she actually read Churchill's essay then she should not be confused, as he lays out many reasons why those people died. Even the title is telling, as it was taken from a comment by Malcom X in reference to the assassination of JFK. He stated that it was a case of the chickens comming home to roost. He later explained that he meant that the assassination resulted from the perpetuation of a climate of hate. In other words, what goes around comes around. If McClintock were paying attention to the man she was criticizing, she may have been enlightened by his reference to the FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND CHILDREN (THAT'S FIVE HUNDRED CHILDREN, ONE THOUSAND TIMES--- try to fit it in your head) THAT DIED, LARGELY DUE TO THE SANCTIONS WE IMPOSED ON THEIR COUNTRY.
If we really want to understand the reasons behind such horrific events, we must be willing to come to terms with the fact that we are largly unaware of much of what actually takes place in the world, partly because it is kept from us, partly because we are not paying attention, and partly because we just don't want to know.
On my blog i have posted an essay which proposes a different view of the Churchill controversy titled "Attack of the Fringe People". I would like for people to read it and tell me what they think about my propositions.