September 11th
Got this out a day late, so I apologize. I thought it appropriate to reflect on September 11, not only due to its inherent significance to me, the U.S., and really the world, but also because it seems to be what pushed blogging into the forefront as a real media outlet.
I’ve never actually written about 9-11 mostly because I only really started blogging about 16 months ago, and I generally don’t blog about major current events or politics, etc. I thought I’d just put down for the record how I remember the event.
I was not in New York, but I was not too terribly far from the Pentagon – about 7 miles to be precise. I woke up that morning and was getting ready to leave for work when my mother called. She still lives in New York City (Manhattan), and is both an early-riser and a news addict. She said that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Still not quite awake, I turned on the TV and CNN was showing live footage of the north tower in flames. My mom mentioned something about terrorists, but I just thought it was a small plane and didn’t think it would amount to much. I was in denial. I said I had to go, hung up, and made my way to work as normal. I don’t remember if I put on the news on the way, or just listened to an audio book.
My drive to where I worked at the time was pretty short – maybe fifteen minutes at most. I came in the back way and knocked on the locked door for one of my coworkers to let me in since my hands were full and didn’t have my keys handy. No one came to the door even though by that time normally at least a couple of folks would be there. I head a phone ringing inside and after a minute or so of knocking and hearing the phone ring with no end, I finally fumbled around for my keys.
When I came into the office, all the lights were on, the phone was still ringing, and not one person was around. That was a little unnerving! I picked up the phone to hear the wife of a coworker. She asked if her husband was there and I said no. She said she’d been trying to get hold of him. I don’t think we talked about the plane.
After a while I realized there was the sound of a TV in the distance. I didn’t realize where this was coming from as I’d forgotten there was a TV in the conference room one floor above us. I finally made my way upstairs to find two other coworkers sitting and watching. At this point I think the other plane had already hit the tower and another plane had hit the pentagon. One of my coworkers said in his drive to the office he saw a plane flying very low in the direction of the Pentagon, and he was sure that was the plane that crashed, although he didn’t actually see it.
The rest of that day, we were all just glued to the TV, Work essentially stopped. After a while when all the false alarms started coming in about other planes or bombs going off in or around DC, we started getting nervous, despite not being that close to DC or any other national symbols, buildings, etc. We all started calling friends and family who were in the DC or New York areas, or even across the country. I was having a hard time getting through to my family in New York due to the cell phone traffic, but eventually found out that my brother in law, William, who sometimes worked around Wall Street but lately had been working across the river in Brooklyn, had walked across the bridge and along the river up to where my mom lives in the east 30’s. Everyone was ok, thank goodness, or at least everyone we knew. Later I learned that a woman that I had gone to study abroad in Russia with had been evacuated from her office building which was only nine blocks from the towers. Thankfully I don’t know anyone who died in the towers that day, and about the closest I came to knowing a victim was that my current roommate’s coworker’s brother was killed at the Pentagon.
Because of all the bomb scares, DC was shut down and it was very hard to get in and out. People had to walk out of the city to find a friend in Virginia to stay with or to drive them home. Luckily most of my friends at the time had email accounts and through email and some phone conversations we were able to make sure everyone we knew was ok.
We came to work for the rest of the week, but no work was done. We just listened to the radio or watched TV the whole week. Flags and impromptu memorials popped up everywhere. There was a profound sense no matter where you went that something BIG had happened and that things had changed in a big way, even though in the DC area only one small area was directly affected by the crash – whereas in Manhattan the dust from the towers falling was everywhere for weeks and of course the biggest reference point to the city that could be seen from a large percentage of it was now missing.
I tried to give blood that week, but hearing that the red cross was overwhelmed, I signed up on their website so someone could contact me as to where to go. I never heard from them. I wish now I had gone home to my family in Manhattan at the time, but things were still so uncertain then and attempting a trip might have met with a 15-hour drive only to be denied access into the city. Plus, after the initial day, I knew that everyone was safe.
I didn’t end up going until two or three weeks later. Even then they weren’t letting people go below maybe Canal Street unless they could prove they lived there. I had no big wish to see ground zero at the time. It was enough to see it on TV! Plus one of the morgs the city was using for 9-11 victims was right next to where my mom lives, and seeing all the police presence and our neighborhood kind of taken over for this purpose was quite enough as well. Walking through the streets and seeing the home-made flyers people had printed up asking people if they had seen a son, a wife, a cousin, were heart-breaking. The police were everywhere.
The weekend after 9-11 there was a planned party at my friend Kit’s to celebrate his girlfriend moving in. While we were in no mood to celebrate, we all agreed it was important to get together as a group of friends, to talk about what had just happened, and just to be with each other in such a disturbing time. At this party, talking with many of my friends and friends of friends, I came across a woman I had talked to before at these parties, but this time we ended up talking for two hours. She worked fairly close to the White House, which, as is now known, was one of the targets that day but was spared either because the plane that eventually hit the Pentagon couldn’t get a good approach, or because the third plane was commandeered by its passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, thus sparing many more lives on the ground. We didn’t just talk about 9-11 that night, of course, but that served many as a moment in our history where we were able to share our experiences, even emotions with perfect strangers. As for this woman, she is now my wife.
That is one good that came out of the attacks, that at least for a while we were a cohesive people and not two (or more) warring camps. Unfortunately, we’ve backtracked quite a bit since. Things are still different now, but not in any immediately obvious way. Sure security checkpoints in general are more beefed up, but in my day-to-day travels, I don’t see any big difference between now and say three and a half years ago. The flags and other emblems on people’s cars have largely disappeared. While 9-11 is still vivid in many people’s memories, for most days of the year it fades into the background. Not that I think we need to be mourning this moment every day of the year, but I do think making this the only real national holiday dedicated to a tragedy may allow some people the room to reflect on the time when as a country we were without politics, where strangers comforted each other even in New York City, where Jews stood guard over mosques for fear of hate crimes. Yes, there were hate crimes as well, but they were isolated and condemned by almost everyone immediately, despite what was an immediate, easy, and obvious target for the anger and pain that was inflicted on the nation.
While 9-11 will always be a wound in the soul of the nation, and a source for pain, we can actually use it for the good. We use it for good by not exploiting it for political purposes, or purposes of condemning an enormous percentage of the planet. While innocent people need to be defended from becoming the victims of hateful groups, governments, or individuals everywhere, supporting or even turning a blind eye to such victims because they are far away, are culturally, racially, or linguistically different from us, or because their attackers provide some small strategic or economic advantage for us, really is inexcusable.