Lower Macungie Woman Felt a City's Shame in 2001

Shielding my eyes from the Indian summer sun, I crossed Tremont Street to hesitantly seek underground refuge at Downtown Boston’s Boylston Street T station — away from the safety of my Lawyers Weekly office and the horrific visual of the crumbling Twin Towers emanating from my boss’s television.

September 11, I thought, as I heeded a downtown-wide evacuation order. 9/11. 9-1-1. Shattered, chaotic thoughts threatened my mental equilibrium. Are my family and friends working and living in southern Connecticut and NYC safe?

Whoa! That oncoming taxi cab just barely missed slamming into that suited man as he drifted in dazed confusion through traffic! Who did this? WHO did this?  Who defiled American soil with such brash aplomb? No doubt, the preeminent thought troubling many American lives that tragic morning.

But my fellow countrymen in NYC, Pennsylvania or even Washington, DC, could not commiserate with one nagging sentiment that I and many other Bostonians felt that day, week and, still perhaps even a decade later.

That is, the shame.

Boston, like an unwilling Benedict Arnold, unleashed two of the al Qaida-hijacked airplanes from Logan International Airport and the ensuing devastation onto out nation.

I literally felt ashamed when I finally connected with friends in New York and Connecticut. The day left me feeling like my adopted hometown of Boston—the historical epitome of young America’s rising freedom — suffered a blatant dereliction of its protective duties.

We were the irresponsible older sibling. The guilty impetus for roughly 2,700 deaths of our brothers and sisters. The blackened conscience of the United States.

Boston forever serves as the last place on earth where many mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children and friends set foot before their deaths.

And that is a hard, humanistic fact to overcome.

Our polite countrymen never wagged such admonishing fingers, but many Bostonians silently blamed themselves even after officials later cleared airport employees of any criminal or regulatory wrongdoing.  In a sense, Boston experienced the tragedy in a very distinct manner. Its people were not necessarily just victims, but guilty survivors or perhaps extrinsic henchmen.

Perhaps the need for subconscious redemption is what motivated my subsequent move to Washington, DC to finish my Boston University graduate studies reporting from the U.S. Capitol (then closed to the non-credentialed public).

That spring of 2002, I helped inform the nation as government officials aimed to remedy the security deficits leading up to the 9/11 attacks. But neither then nor afterward, when I worked as a journalist in NYC, ever truly unhinged the rusting, personal guilt pronged deep within my subconscious.

Acceptance, however, nudges its way closer each anniversary. I accept that I mourn 9/11 in a different, yet very similar, way as many Americans. There will always be a sense of guilt, regardless of where you lived, that there was nothing you or your neighbors could do to prevent a terrorist agenda from unfolding on Sept. 11, 2001. And so, the healing process for us all continues.

Marissa Yaramich is a Patch contributor who lives in Lower Macungie Township.