Memories And Ruminations Of 9/11, And Why It Still Matters

[Currently Listening To: Calla - Televise]



I honestly hadn't given much thought to the anniversary of 9/11 - in a way, the whole thing has become soured to me, having been used so shamelessly as a political tool and a weapon of fear thousands upon thousands of times since it actually happened. Media tributes seem like desperate rating grabs (or even thinly-veiled political propaganda), and the absurd posturing of Bush and his weird Christian Zombie wife laying wreaths at ground zero seem like desperate popularity grabs. I'm sure that somewhere - amongst those who lost friends and loved ones on that fateful day - there is a great deal of sincerity and emotion buried within the 9/11 media exploitation, but it is certainly not coming from our evil android Vice President Dick Cheney, seen here looking like he was coached for hours on how to appear to be showing emotion. Call it cynicism, but I don't buy for a minute that the phrase 9/11 brings anything but joy to the neocons of the Bush administration. After all, it's been their weapon of choice in garnering support for a variety of insidious and absurdly unrelated campaigns, most notably the Iraq war. So yeah, 9/11 had lost a lot of power to me. Buried in politics and treaded on recklessly by administrative mis-steps in the five years since, I'd become cynical about the whole thing.

Then, this morning, I read a good op-ed piece on salon.com which really captured the way I think people should be thinking and feeling in regards to the 9/11 anniversary. It took me back to the weird sensation in the air the weeks following the attacks, and the opportunity to unify the nation and the world that we so tragically squandered.

In September of 2001 I had just gone back to school in New York after a long tenure down in New Orleans (yeah, I have a peculiar habit of living in tragedy-prone cities - I'm half expecting Hollywood to finally sink into the Pacific now that I'm living here). I had just moved into my Brooklyn apartment, so it was little more than a couple empty rooms with some boxes and a bed. I had no TV, no internet, no phone. I didn't even have a cell phone - I was stuck in the 90's with my pager. For someone who is usually so connected I practically have wires coming out of me, it was a curious little period of disconnectedness for me, where the world could literally have been falling apart right outside my window and I'd have no idea.

I was meant to go to a meeting in Manhattan on the morning of the 11th, but I overslept and was awoken by the abrasive buzzing of my pager. It was text from my Mother: "are you okay?" She'd paged me a few days prior and I had never called her back, so I figured it was her usual Motherly paranoia, and ignored it. I got dressed and ready to head out to my meeting, and received two more pages from my Mother. I was getting annoyed, ready to scold her for worrying too much when I don't get back to her right away - just as soon as I could get to a payphone (yeah, payphones, remember those?). I went outside, onto my little ghetto Brooklyn street, and I specifically recall how strange everything seemed. There was an eerie quiet to the city, interrupted periodically by the passage of ambulances and fire trucks zooming down my avenue (a main Brooklyn artery). An unusual amount of people were out in the street sort of aimlessly; shopkeepers out of their stores, people gathered together around radios and televisions. At the time, though, I didn't pay any of it any notice - I was late for my meeting, and I had just gotten a page from a coworker down in New Orleans asking "dude are you okay?" I was incredibly annoyed at that, certain my Mother was having a weird paranoid moment and was calling my work to ask if they'd heard from me. Determined to call her and tell her to chill the fuck out, I found that every single payphone was being used. I made my way down the street, and it was starting to feel like a scene from a comedy, the absurdity of not a single payphone being vacant when usually they're just collecting dust. I was thinking to myself, what the fuck is going on today? As more ambulances flew by and I hurriedly passed a couple shops where people were huddled around televisions, I briefly heard something about terrorism and bomb threats, and I thought, ah, okay, there was a bomb threat in the city or some shit, whatever. I finally found a vacant payphone and - after numerous attempts ending with "all circuits are busy," I got through to my Mother at work. As soon as she answered, I snapped at her: "Mom, what?? I'm fine, you have to chill out when I don't call you for a few days!" Her response was a long pause, followed with, "...You don't know?" And right then, right at that moment, I did what I somehow had not managed to do the entire time I'd been outside: I looked up. Above me, a thick black plume of smoke was spreading like a shadow across New York. It wasn't like "Oh, something's on fire," it was like "Oh my God, the world is ending." It was a big, ugly, menacing tower of smoke.

From there everything just got weirder and weirder - pieces started to fall into place, and I made my way to a rooftop of my school where I had a clear view of the former World Trade Center. Everyone has seen pictures, and pictures, and more pictures of that smoke pouring out of the buildings, blanketing the city, but if you didn't actually see it in person no photo can describe how massive and scary it was - how weird and uncertain and fragile the mighty city of New York had suddenly become under the weight of that smoke. The day carried on in kind of a fragmented blur. I remember standing in front of an electronics shop where dozens of people were watching the news on the televisions in the window, CNN playing the footage of the collapsing buildings over and over again. I had a class scheduled for noon and no one even showed up. At my three o'clock class, the teacher was there but at a loss for words. After five minutes he dismissed us. As dusk fell, the city was unanimously scared and uncertain. Every television report we'd heard discussed at length the possibility of a follow-up attack. Everyone was on edge. I did all I could do - I sat on the roof of my school with a small group of friends, drinking Brooklyn Lager and not really saying much while we watched that incredible smoke light up with the glow of the setting sun. For such a terrible thing, it was actually incredibly beautiful at that moment. I took this picture:



It was difficult sleeping that night. Sirens continued blaring around the clock, and paranoia had a strange way of waking me up every time something sounded like a plane passing overhead - wondering if the sound of a great explosion would be soon to follow. Normally I'd be listlessly watching the news and reading websites until all hours of the morning, desperate to glean every ounce of knowledge about the situation I could. But in my black hole of connectivity - without even a radio to tell me if another attack had occurred - I could do nothing but lay there in bed, antsy and uncertain, trying to fall asleep.

When the subways reopened I took the first opportunity to venture into Manhattan and see everything close up. The entire city south of Canal Street was closed off, so I stood there at a police barricade, alongside confused tourists and mourning locals, watching the utter chaos of police and fire trucks, and that dreadful smoke still flowing steadily. The ground was covered in a layer of dust and ash. As the days pressed on, the atmosphere in New York was without exaggeration one of the strangest, eeriest, most incredible things I've ever experienced. With life basically frozen for everyone, my classes were canceled and my job was on hold, so I spent a few days just wandering the city and soaking everything in. No one really seemed sure what to do, for a while. No one wanted to just stay at home, but no one could work. Businesses were open, but only out of a need for familiarity. No one was buying anything, and nothing was getting accomplished. People were just sort of vacantly going through the motions of regular life, while everyone's thoughts were on the same thing. Every surface in Manhattan was covered with these horrible "MISSING" flyers - handmade papers duplicated on Xerox machines with pictures of people who were unaccounted for after 9/11. They would say things like "My brother Tom Stevens, last seen on the 32nd floor the morning of 9/11, please call if you have seen him." They felt so hopeless and tragic, those flyers - and they were everywhere - a constant, sobering reminder of the event's ongoing human impact. Union Square Park - my favorite Manhattan gathering place - became one of dozens of open memorials around the city that went on for months. I took this picture there, two weeks after 9/11:



Meanwhile, the sense of unity and nationalism in New York was rising. Like never before, everyone was together in grief and compassion. Everyone you passed on the street felt like family - suddenly you had something huge and powerful in common with millions of strangers - something bigger than all of your differences combined. It was the first time I'd experienced the unprecedented warmth and humanity that swells up in people amidst a tragedy. New York's famously callous attitude had melted away, at least for a moment - it soon returned, in the form of a focused and unified anger. Everyone wanted revenge.



As the blame for 9/11 fell into place - squarely on Osama bin Laden - there was much ado about how bad we all wanted his head on a plate. Walking down the street in Brooklyn at any given point you were bound to hear someone spouting their own colorful opinions about America's new #1 enemy. T-shirts like the one pictured above (and the far more exploitative one at the top of this entry) sprung up as quickly as the American flags had, with the cheap Chinatown souvenir industry anxious to capitalize on the unified aggression. Everyone gathered to watch how Bush was going to respond. Are we going to war? Certainly there's going to be some retaliation, right? Why haven't we invaded Afghanistan yet? Let's kill those fuckers!

This was a crucial moment in American history, because the entire world was united with us. This is a time when France - fucking France - even proclaimed, "We are all Americans." Republicans and Democrats, Americans and Europeans - we were one, with a common enemy, and there was no question that retaliation was necessary, it was just a matter of when and how.

It's also important to remember that few people hated Bush at this time. Sure, he was a bumbling idiot who'd stolen the 2000 election, but he hadn't done anything yet to light the fire of opposition that would ultimately engulf him. In fact, 9/11 was the first significant thing to happen in his presidency, and he initially seemed to be handling it very well. It's important to remember that in those days following 9/11, everything was stacked up in our favor. It's important to remember that because it underscores how badly we blew it. Five years later, many thousands more have died, the world views us as arrogant war mongers, we have incited a rise in terrorism and anti-American sentiment, freedoms of our citizens have been stripped away, we are less safe than we were before 9/11... and we still haven't even caught the man who was once so squarely in our crosshairs.

The Salon article discusses this far more eloquently than I can, so I suggest you read it and observe a very important point that the mainstream media tends to strangely ignore: While the oft-quoted number of American casualties on 9/11 - 2,873 - is a staggering number, it shouldn't ever be quoted without an addendum of the 2,700 Americans who have been killed fighting the needless Iraq war. They're all victims of 9/11, but for different reasons - and the latter group is never given the same respect and honor as the first, because Bush solemnly honoring the victims of the World Trade Center is good for his image, but acknowledging the victims of the war he started certainly isn't. So of course there is no memorial for those victims - no television events to remember their sacrifices. Rather, images of soldiers' coffins draped with American flags have been aggressively shielded from the media. God forbid the truth make our fearless leaders look bad. Oh, and we haven't even mentioned the almost 50,000 innocent Iraqis reportedly dead. Certainly, their deaths are not as important as the people who died in those towers, right?

The point is that while we are being bombarded with patriotic exploitation as we're asked to remember the people who died on 9/11 - let's not forget 9/11's real impact, and the many, many more people who have died as a result of our arrogant country abusing 9/11's emotional power.

In October of 2001 - roughly three weeks after 9/11 - I had the opportunity to tour ground zero, while it was still being searched and gutted, well before it was open to the public. From the balcony of an adjacent skyscraper, the view of the wreckage below was staggering. Seeing it in person transcended the images on television so much more than I could have expected. The only experience in my life I can compare it to is seeing the destruction in New Orleans first-hand. I took a picture from that balcony, looking down on the former World Trade Center:



When we came down from the skyscraper and stood on the ground, dwarfed by twisted spires of warped structural beams and mountains of rubble, we walked onto a hastily-constructed wooden platform where the families of those who had died in the towers had been allowed to stand and view ground zero. There, the bereaved who had come before us had carved their thoughts and prayers into the platform's wooden guard rails. Messages like "To my fiance Karen, rest in peace, I love you so much," and "I miss you Daddy," were among hundreds of gut-wrenchingly sad goodbye notes scrawled on that wooden beam, each one more heart-breaking than the last. It flooded us with the deeply personal sadness of the whole thing, and brought tears to our eyes. It was clear that the world was going to change - we only hoped it could be for the better.

Five years later, television will attempt to tug at your heart strings with stories of tragedy and mourning. Politicians will attempt to tug at your patriotism with stories of why we fight. But few places will discuss the real impact of 9/11. We should all remember what we lost that day - but the most patriotic thing any of us could do is acknowledge all of what we lost - and ask if it was really necessary.