My Day Seven Years Ago

I awoke after a fitful night's sleep to Chris, hysterical, shaking me and exclaiming "the twin towers have been hit by planes!" My gut didn't believe him, but I played along, jumping out of bed and running to the TV. At first, the footage looked minor: a plane had crashed into the most massive buildings in the country. How much damage could that possibly do? I thought back to pictures I had seen of the incedent in the 1930s involving a biplane crashing into the newly-built Empire State Building. Still, there was something unreal about it.

We stepped out into the dazzlingly beautiful day, not believing the images we had just seen on TV. On our way to Washington Square - the best Twin Towers vantage point we could think of - we ran into a sea of people, all walking wearily uptown, some covered from head to toe in dark gray ash. The street was crammed; no room for cars or anyone foolhardy enough to be venturing downtown. Their faces registered shock, exhaustion, but most of all, pure bewilderment. Our worlds had just been turned outside down, and people were struggling to reorient themselves. People were lost.

This sense of profound confusion struck me when we reached the park and, looking down the island at a view I had marveled at many times before, I saw a black pillar of smoke suspended in the bright blue. We must have stood there staring for a solid ten minutes: I was waiting for the besmirched sky to clear so I could get a look at the damage to the towers - at the time we watched TV earlier, the only footage shown was that of a firey hole in the side of one of the buildings. But no towers materialized. Surely they were just hiding behind the smoke? They couldn't be gone. My statistician's mind flashed to a TV program I had seen years ago that said that 50,000 people worked in the trade center daily. Where were all of those people? I looked around and saw that a head-scratching mass of humanity was engaging in the same sort of tortured mental juggling I was: this was impossible. They must be there.

Everyone registered their confusion differently. Groups of students huddled together in circles, sobbing uncontrollably; a red-haired girl laughed awkwardly and had her boyfriend take a picture of her smiling with the black devastation behind her; a grizzled old Rastafarian started chanting, "Babylon is falling! Babylon is falling!" We entered this buzzing congregation and asked around: "What happened? Who did this?" Nobody knew a thing. I asked one friend what he had heard, and his eyes took on a distant, glazed look: we were all too busy coping with the enormity of the giant hole in the sky to care. Even as we mingled, expressing our mutual bewilderment, everyone's eyes kept drifting south. Each and every time, part of me expected to see them there, standing arrogantly over lower Manhattan. I imagined the crowds erupting with a sigh of relief over this false alarm and everyone shuffling back home.

It's amazing the banal thoughts that take over in times of crisis. In an attempt to grapple with the unimaginable, we are led to embrace the trivial and the meaningless to block out harsh realities. My big beginning-of-the-school-year audition was scheduled for later that afternoon, and I recall contemplating seriously what I should do about it. Would it be OK to just not show up or should I call? Does the toppling of the World Trade Center warrant a postponement of my jazz audition? Those are the sorts of absurd thoughts that fill one's head when one is confronted with the incomprehensible.

This may seem a strange word to use here, but the experience of the first 24 hours after the towers fell was surreal in a way that bordered on the psychedelic. Seeing the smoke billow up there in Washington Square violently punctured the bubble most Americans my age had lived in until that point. Something unreal was happening in front of our eyes; history was grabbing us and screaming. Like a psychedelic experience, this challenged my sense of what was real and what was not. After the initial shock, we all started grappling for something real, information, news, something. It was impossible to find a newspaper and, of course, things were changing too quickly for the authoritative NYT account to really mean anything anyways. We jumped into the current of bodies and let ourselves be pushed uptown.

Confusion was quickly transforming into fear. Just as soon as the realization that the towers had collapsed hit us, a torrent of anxious questions flowed to the surface. We were under attack. We didn't know by whom, but that made the fear all the more hyperreal. Rumors swept through the shell-shocked streets, and we quickly settled on the obvious truth that "they" were on their way to destroy the Empire State Building. We were a people under siege, or so we felt.

On the journey north to find information, the loud roar of a low-flying plane filled the air. For a few seconds, hundreds of people stopped walking around me, stopped talking, and stared - terrified - into the skies. It was a moment that I instantly felt should not be happening: frightened people on the streets of New York City scanning the horizon for a plane whose pilot wanted to kill us. The fear was palpable, overwhelming - and totally real. For that afternoon, once reality has been intruded upon so horrifically, anything else was on the table. If someone would have shouted that armed gunmen were invading the island and shooting everyone, I'm sure most of us would have believed it. Our senses and rationality were too pulverized to put up a fight. When a solitary F-16 fighter jet emerged over the jagged skyscrapers, you could literally hear a collective sigh. We all turned north and began our march again.

All the newsstands were either boarded up or sold out of the late edition of the Times, but I managed to find a copy of the New York Post, finally. It's a rag, of course, but we were hungry for any information we could get. Tearing into the paper, my eyes fixed on the leading article: "Let's Kill the Bastards." Just as most of us were struggling with the grim reality of the situation and trying to fight back panic, some were already plotting who we should bomb. My heart sank, and I turned to Chris: "This is the sort of stuff that wars are launched over." In a split-second, I understood that this disaster was a game-changer, that my country would never be the same afterwards, and that the bubble of American exceptionalism and isolation had crumbled that day along with the towers. It was a dizzying thought.

That night, putrid smelling smoke blanketed the East Village as we stayed up with a group of 5 or 6 refugee-friends from lower Manhattan (who would end up staying with us for a couple weeks) and watched as the first shots were fired in the battle to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban. It would be another two weeks until classes tentatively started up again: we tried to keep ourselves active, despite the complete, hermetic, military sealing off of our neighborhood from the rest of the world. We discussed the incident endlessly and kept the TV running; we joked, played Mario Kart and tried to keep ourselves distracted; we even went down to the West Side Highway with a few bags full of powerbars and tried to help aid workers as they poured into the newly-annointed "ground zero." And we sat around wondering what new world this disaster had created and how it would affect our lives. Everything had shifted overnight.

Within a couple weeks, however, life was starting to return - tentatively - to normal. There was fear in the smoky air, but hearty New Yorkers, despite their intimate involvement with the 9/11 attack, were eager to return to normalcy. In late September, I returned to Oregon for a weekend in an effort to clear my mind and refresh my spirit (and boy was airfare cheap in the days after the disaster..). It was truly surprising, then, to see that Oregonians, through their TVs, had internalized 9/11 in such a completed different way than New Yorkers had. American flags were everywhere; people displayed jingoistic bumper stickers on their trucks; there was a level of aggression that I didn't see at all in New York. You can bet that New Yorkers weren't angrily chanting for bombing strikes on the enemy, yet in Salem, OR, people were. Interestingly, the very people who lived through 9/11 were the first who wanted to simply move on. Of course, the rest of America would have their wars.

To end on a political note: It is deeply discouraging to sit here today during a neck and neck presidential election as the same party that so completely mismanaged our collective goodwill, politicized our national tragedy, subverted our Constitution, and hastily rushed into a bloody and corporatized war that had nothing to do with 9/11, is running against itself as an agent of "change" and actually making some headway. It fills me with disgust when misguided Republicans at the convention chant "Drill, baby, Drill!," even as the regimes that sponsor terrorism have the most to gain from our dependence on this competely destructive form of energy (Rudy Guiliani should know better than that). As we commemorate and memorialize this awful day for America, we should be cognizant of what's at stake this presidential election. Though the GOP has been so quick to capitalize on 9/11 for crass political gain, their botched Middle East policies, unjustifiable military adventurism, and anemic ideas in the aftermath of the biggest terrorist attack on US soil should give us pause as we stand in the voting booth. Let us not forget September 11th on November 4th.