It’s hard to write about 9/11. I have written before the where-were-you posts, and I’m not going to do it again this year. The short version is that I was in New York, I had just moved into my dorm room at NYU and started classes at Tisch. I did not graduate from there, and 9/11 played no small part in that decision.

It’s nine years later. I can still remember the shock and fear and anger that I felt on that day. Watching this happen to my country. The wound still feels very raw and it makes me wonder. Where is the healing?

This year, the anniversary of 9/11 is shrouded in hate, intolerance, and fighting. I can’t help but think that this is a direct response to the way we as a country resonded.

We were attacked on our own soil, in a deadly act of terror. Universally, we asked–what can we do.

The answer was: nothing. Go back to normal, we were told. Go shopping. Live your lives as if nothing has changed, our politicians and business leaders said, and don’t worry your pretty little heads about it.

We were not asked to sacrifice. We were not asked to contribute. We were not asked to consider our lives in any way.

The party line is this–Americans are unwilling. We are spoiled, we are lazy, we are whiny children who can’t be asked to do anything. But have we ever been asked?

Perhaps we ar so disengaged, perhaps we are so easily distracted by mindless entertainment and the self-indulgent antics of celebrities because we know that we are in a system that does not value or even accept our contributions. We behave as a nation of rebellious teenagers because no one has given us the tough love to grow up.

Contrast this message–go shopping, don’t change, rack up your credit card debt so everyone knows we’ve run–to FDR’s address to the nation after Pearl Harbor.

I snuck this photo on my commute yesterday because it made me smile!

It’s hard to see, but I was sitting across from a gentleman who was wearing all black from head to toe. But there, peeking out from tops of his shoes, was a splash of red from his socks!

No idea if the socks were hand knit or not, but something about that sneaky bit of color just made me grin.

One of the things I’ve always considered myself is to be a crafter or a maker. I lean more towards the crafty side of things–I’d prefer to play with yarn and fabric than circuit boards or plywood, but the impulse is the same. I want to take some materials and turn them into something greater than the sum of the parts. I want to fiddle with string and wind up with a sweater. I want to start with some simple ingredients and wind up with delicious cupcakes. I want to have something that I can hold in my hands, to see, touch, taste and know that I made this.

I don’t think I’m alone.

I’ve been reading a book on US history lately, and it’s dense but fascinating. I’m not very far in, due to the inability to carry such a hefty book on my commute, but one of the things that has struck me was the role that craftsmen played in the founding of the US. Many came here to escape the overcrowded market of Europe, came here because materials were plentiful. What colonial America may have lacked in great literature or fine art, it had in spades in skilled craft. Silversmiths, carpenters, brewers, blacksmiths. Trade restrictions were a large part of why the Revolutionary War happened in the first place.

With this in mind, I ask myself–what the hell happened?

The cultural history of America, at least as it is dominately taught and considered,* is one that has grown out of makers and farmers. The men and women who grew the food that they ate, who crafted with their own hands the good that were needed. Yet what two things are almost entirely missing from our modern life?

Farming has become a mechanized, industrial enterprise. There are fewer and fewer farmers, and a system that encourages large-scale production in a system that leads to unsafe food (salmonella outbreaks, e coli, meat and dairy filled with antibiotics and hormones) and products that bear only the slightest resemblance to the food they claim to be (bright orange ‘cheese,’ high fructose corn syrup, most packaged food). As for craftsmanship…where can you buy things made here? The idea of buying something made by  a person has become a luxury–a mark of snobbery, even. It’s more American, now, to trot on down to the local Wal-Mart and pay $99 for your new pressboard dining set, made in China by someone who doesn’t make a living wage and is probably in a work situation that would best be described as inhumane.

With this, we have lost our self-sufficiency. Even basic skills are now hobbies–and often unpopular ones at that. Even if you’re like me, and you hang out with a pretty crafty crowd, you can probably think of at least a few people you know who rely heavily on a system that allows us to outsource pretty much every aspect of our lives. How many people do you know who can cook a meal (without a microwave)? What about repairing a tear in a pair of pants? Fixing a small hole in a wall?

All this has been spinning in my mind as I watch endless news coverage of the recession. The talking heads and the news anchors and pundints all wringing their hands and forcing false optimism as they talk about how we’ll get back to the way things  were. When we all sat in our comfy air conditioned offices shuffling papers around and playing with numbers on a screen and making lots and lots of money that can be used to go buy lots and lots of cheap goods from other countries. Nothing that requires actual work, of course, that would be unseemly.

Nobody bothers to ask if we should.

Maybe we should be looking back…but not back to the (falsely) prosperous years of the recent past. Maybe we need to be looking back to our past, our heritage. To small farmers and small businesses and craftsmen who learned a trade and made things. Well made things. It won’t be easy. We’d have to let go of a lot. Of the idea that we need new stuff and more stuff all the time. That everything is disposeable, and things we don’t like should be tossed on the trash heap. Even our diet–fewer quick meals, more staples, less luxury foods. Things in season.

But wouldn’t it be more satisfying, too? To be able to hold something in your hands at the end of the day? To learn and perfect a skill rather than feeling like you’re in a race to keep up with the changing tide? To have really done something?

Many of us have the soul of a maker. Why not get back to those roots?

* I say dominant cultural history because obviously there are many groups in the population for whom the early American experience was quite different. This is not meant to dismiss or exclude any of these groups, rather it is intended to focus on the idea of American culture as it is commonly taught to us and preserved in national myth and consciousness.