Batra Taresh - With their eyes: September 11th, the view from a high school at ground zero

SEPTEMBER 11TH the view from a high school at ground zero with their eyes edited by
ANNIE THOMS Created by
Taresh Batra Anna Belc Marcel Briones Catherine Choy Tim Drinan Ilena George Shanleigh Jalea Lindsay Long-Waldor Liz O'Callahan Chantelle Smith Michael Vogel Carlos Williams Christopher M. Yee photos by ETHAN MOSES For the victims of the September 11th attacks,
their families and friends,
and all those who have suffered in the aftermath. Contents

They saw what I could not see. While they were witnessing this history firsthand, I was on a runway at La Guardia Airport, seeing it from afar, as a small puff of smoke. Eventually I, like others around the world, would be dependent on the storytelling of othersthe media, or the stories of those who were close enough to see it with their own eyes. Even as I write this, eight months later, many of us are still hearing and learning particulars of that story. Stuyvesant High School is just four blocks from Ground Zero. Under the direction of an English teacher, Annie Thoms, these students did an original and generous thing in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Some went to volunteer for the Red Cross, others took care of their friends, and some tried to give blood. But these students did something more, and something that most of the nation has yet to do, even now, eight months later. They immediately started to create history, and they immediately started to create art. Recording history and making art might not seem like major strokes on a canvas full of great things that were donethe work of the fire department, the police department, Mayor Giuliani, the President, his cabinet, those who helped neighbors, strangers, those who risked their lives, the journalists who have written stories, the journalists who, for The New York Times for example, committed to telling every story of every person who was killed, those who have given money, and others too numerous to mention. What does it mean, then, that these high school students set out to create art, as I say, and to record history on the cusp of a national emergency, an emergency that rocked the nation, and leaves us, even now, quaking? One of the places I visited in the several days immediately following September 11th was the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I stopped several people who were entering, and asked what it was they hoped to find in the museum at such a time.

One man told me that art has survived war, famine, floods. Art that manages to do so, art that successfully reveals and captures the spirit of its timethe spirit of violence and terror, as well as the spirit of love and celebrationlasts for centuries. And then what about history? We all know the value of history. Histories are being written about the events of September 11th. Journalism itself is, as we know, historys first draft. The great histories, like the great works of art, will be created after much contemplation, some long after all of us who experienced it are deceased.

In fact, the great histories and great works of art will require months, years, decades, centuries of reflection. Whats special about this particular history and this particular art? This particular history is written not just with the eyes, but with the ears and the bodies of these young students. It is critical that they have written this history precisely because it is their history, and a history for their world and their future. We, some of us, who have the authority to speak for many, nonetheless will depend on these teenagers to create the world of the future. How will they bring humanity through its greatest present challenge: the challenge of how to guarantee the survival of the human race through a dramatically fractious time, and a time with enormous technological resources, but very poor human ones? This history, with all its details, all its particulars, is important. A year from now, ten years from now, the particulars will be erased.

It is the erasure of particulars that has, in fact, fostered the kind of coarse segmentation of societies that we have. It is the erasure of particulars that causes us to look at the world in black and white. The very fact that these students were asked to listen for particulars is a first step to making the world a more habitable place. My generation has created a world where we are rewarded for talk. Look at television any hour of the day and you will see a parade of talk, because talk, you see, is cheaper for television producers to make than fiction. Very little in our society celebrates listening.

That these students, with the aid of their teacher and their tape recorders, were required, ultimately, to listen to this talk with all its unfinished sentences, its uhs, ums, and you knows, is already an advance. Could it be that a first step is to create a generation of listeners? You who are reading may be tempted to skip over those uhs and ums to get to the point. Know that when you do that, you miss the point. The point is that each individual has a particular story to tell, and the story is more than words: the story is its rhythms and its breaths. Notice how articulate everyone becomes when we give our attention to much more than the point. Listen to the words of a freshman, Katie Berringer, as she describes what it was like to go to another school while Stuyvesant was being restored: It was kinda like everybody was a freshman.

And indeed, in those days, all of us New Yorkers, whether we were stuck at airports, required to walk miles home from work, smelling that smell that permeated the air for weeks, or reflecting suddenly on our mortality, both individual and nationaleverybody was, as this young student says in her own particularly eloquent way, a freshman. This book is a blueprint. What these students ultimately did was to make a play in which they played the parts of these individual speakers. They were compelled, then, to empathize with these individuals, to put themselves in another persons words the way, in the past, we have thought metaphorically of putting ourselves in other peoples shoes. Could it be that a first step is to create a generation of leaders who can empathize? Could it be that empathy can even serve as a defense against that which could harm us? Keep your enemies as close as your friends, they used to say. Could it be that we should pour resources into creating laboratories where we learn about human communication with the same seriousness that we study fiber-optic communication? So, these acting, linguistic historians at Stuyvesant High, a high school perhaps much like any other high school in 2002 where youngsters can stay within their safety zones, dared to wear and learn and embody the words of othersfellow students, their teachers, the staff.