I wouldn't have said this at the time, but after 9/11, my aspirations shifted from 'achieve and accomplish' to 'find home and root there.'
I was 23 years old, living in England at the time, though my family was mostly back in the states, Connecticut and New York. One month into a PhD program for neuroscience, I was in the lab when people asked me (the only American) whether I had seen the news that a plane hit the World Trade Center. I hadn't. I remember asking, "What kind of plane?" and the way everyone just stared at me was eerie - like they knew something I did not. In my mind, some pilot had goofed - a terrorist strike on New York Citu simply didn't occur to me as a possibility (yet). I didn't lose anyone close to me in the attack, but two weeks later I quit my Ph.D and moved home. All of it - the planes grounded for a few days, the anthrax scare afterward - showed me loud and clear that I was on the wrong side of the ocean and the most important thing was to get back home to be near the people I love. I wouldn't have said this at the time, but after 9/11, my aspirations shifted from 'achieve and accomplish' to 'find home and root there'. I never went back to live in England, and I never returned to scientific research. I moved to New York City, got a job as an editor, and joined some grassroots groups who were resisting the war on Iraq and the snatching of our Muslim neighbors from their homes as a 'counterterrorism' strategy. I had never been an 'activist' before, so I kind of got a crash course on community organizing, racism, oppression, justice and power. I volunteered for the ACLU and learned that being a well-dressed white girl gave me a sort of invisibility cloak at protests (it would be another decade before I heard the term 'white privilege'). When I arrived in Burlington in 2007, I recognized a spirit of resistance among many of the people I met — a sense that communities here will not tolerate the mistreatment of their neighbors or swallow crap handed down from advertisers and bad leaders. Vermonters think and do for themselves, and I fit in. I knew this was a place I could proudly root myself and call home.
Jeri Belisle
