Having grown up in the New York metro area, and having family still living there on September 11, 2001, I had something personal to lose. I remember watching the events live on TV where I was living in Seattle, feeling my stomach want to drop into my shoes because I knew those buildings, had been up in them, had been in and out of the Chambers Street subway station beneath them; knew personally how incredibly huge they were and thus how teeming with people; how monolithically solid they were and thus how profound it was that they collapsed as if dropped by those demolition experts who specialize in felling a building in its tracks.
I started worrying where my brother was ... he didn't work at the WTC but in Wall Street, but his commute took him through that Chambers Street station which I realized the buildings must inevitably have collapsed into ... he phoned me before I had a chance to phone him, knowing I'd be worried. God/ess bless him, he'd slept in late, and wound up watching the insanity from the roof of his apartment building in Chelsea. As the day wore on, more New York based friends checked in through the Internet. One woman who worked in the WTC had only just arrived at work and still had her running shoes on when the first plane hit. She was in the other tower; she completely ignored the PA announcements that at that point were telling people to stay calm and stay put, turned around and ran down every flight of stairs till she hit ground and kept running, some instinct telling her to get the hell out while the getting was good ... I remember a TV clip of a middle-aged gentleman in a suit--short, pudgy, winded, but still running northward, stopping just long enough to tell the interviewer in a strong NY accent that he'd been running since the first plane hit and he was just going to keep moving. And I blessed him too. And then there were the more tragic check-ins ... my food-enthusiast network bore messages from people who knew the staff at Windows on the World, the famous restaurant atop one of the towers ... and like everyone above the plane strike on that tower, everyone who was on duty for the breakfast rush that morning was doomed, from the chef on down to the busboys and dishwashers, the terrible egalitarianism of disaster.
I could not then, and to this day still cannot summon up rage at the terrorists. I view them as similar to abused animals who themselves had been so terrorized that they were now broken, made insane with violence, and no longer capable of understanding the ramifications of their actions in terms of the human death and suffering they would cause. But I remember even that very day, watching the disaster, and thinking "Oh shit, we've finally gotten someone pissed off enough at us to come dispell our illusion that we're safe on our continent, an ocean away from the fights we pick with other countries..." followed by "Oh shit, now Bush Jr. has just been handed the excuse he needed for the war he's been spoiling for ever since he took office..." And in the days that followed, every time Bush and company used the WTC attack to whip up the US' ugly xenophobic streak to go wreak revenge--on the wrong country, yet! Even then we knew the terrorists were based in Afghanistan, not Iraq!--every time he and his people used that tragedy for their own cynical ends, I was deeply morally offended.
And now as I try to avoid listening too much to the rabid right-wing nabobs who continue to use the WTC attack for cynical ends, and continue to incite the mob to blind phobic hatred of an entire religion and culture, I wonder if we'll ever learn the real lessons of 9/11 -- that the answer to misguided violence out of blind hatred is not more misguided violence out of blind hatred, but the clear-eyed identification of the true adversaries and the mature building of alliances to remove that adversary's power; and, to repeat myself, there is a tragic egalitarianism to disasters like these, in that the thousands who died in the WTC, typical New Yorkers all, came from every walk of life and every ethnic and religious group in the world--including numerous victims who were themselves Muslims. And we should mourn every single one of them, and come together with their living counterparts so that no such atrocity should ever again happen and try to divide us.
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