9/11 Reflections

It was around 8:45 in the morning when I pulled my van into my employer’s parking lot in Long Island. I parked my car and made my way into the long black building on that bright, almost cloudless day and proceeded to the company cafeteria. I was on a low-carbohydrate diet at the time, so I picked up three hot sausage patties and a large coffee, and then I went downstairs to my cubicle in the Information Technology division. It was then about 9 o’clock. The date was September 11th, 2001.

Just as I came to within a few steps of the bottom of the stairs, I noticed a small group of my fellow workers huddled silently in a cubicle just to the right of the steps. I walked over and asked them what was going on that kept them so engaged. In response, I received the news that a plane struck the World Trade Center. I finished making my way to my work area, powered on my computer, and I accessed a news website just out of curiosity. The news reported that a plane, possibly a small corporate jet, smacked into the north tower. However, the image shown on the site appeared to be less the work of a small jet and more the work of a gigantic smoking fist.

Unknown to me at the time, my wife was in a car on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (“B.Q.E.”), and from her vantage point she saw and heard that which was the first awful strike against mainland America in the new millennium. As the north tower burst into flames and smoke filled the downtown Manhattan skyline, traffic around my wife immediately slowed to a crawl as drivers and passengers alike sat in awe of the distant, fiery spectacle.

As I sat in my cubicle, I continued for some time to shrug off the incident as a tragic accident until someone said, “The second tower’s been hit!” I initially thought that flaming debris from the first crash had sparked what I thought to be a secondary fire in the south tower. I clicked “refresh” on my browser and waited to see a picture of a minor spark. What I saw looked as though an atomic blast was erupting from within the other tower. That’s when I joined a growing chorus of gasps and whispers as all of us on the floor uttered the same things over and over: “IT’S TERRORISTS! IT’S NO ACCIDENT! WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!”

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway became a virtual parking lot as traffic ground to a halt. From her vantage point on the roadway, my wife saw the second terrorist Kamikaze streak into the south tower. Meanwhile, my job, like the expressway, also came to a stop. Mouths gaped. Eyes widened. Tears ran freely. Everyone ran to their computers and browsed to news sites. We were dependent on information from the web because the department was so far underground and behind so much concrete and reinforcing metal, radio signals just couldn’t reach us. Unfortunately, with everyone clicking “connect,” “refresh,” and “live video,” the majority of our computer network quickly overloaded and browsers froze. Similarly, the local telephone system shut down from overuse.

Shock turned into disbelief, but strangely, yet amazingly, disbelief did not segue into panic. No, there was just anger. Oh, yes, there was much, much anger. We spoke of bloody vengeance. We wanted, or needed, the skewered heads of every terrorist on a silver platter. We were possessed of a righteous, nationalistic anger born of the helplessness and utter frustration of being unable to do anything but absorb the terrible fact that we were absolutely powerless to save our doomed, defenseless countrymen.

A single computer within one large cube miraculously continued to pull information reliably from the web. Just about everyone on the entire floor huddled in and around that single space where, in tortuous silence, we strained to hear the tale of death and disaster from the computer’s tiny speaker. As reports filed in, each more vivid than the last, we stood stock-still, as though movement was yet another thing to fear. Faces drew tight. Eyes narrowed. Fists clenched. Brief outbursts of the four-lettered kind caught the air. We found ourselves staring not at each other, but at the computer housing the minimal speaker as though it were a living thing, as if it were Edward R. Murrow somehow reincarnated in wires and silicon chips.

The company immediately closed for the day, and the building quickly became a ghost town. I knew that my wife was somewhere in Brooklyn and that our children were in a school in a western part of Queens county. She couldn’t reach them, not with an impromptu evacuation of lower Manhattan underway and roads closing for the movement of heavy equipment and emergency personnel. I swore that I would reach our kids and bring them home safely. For all I or anyone else knew, terrorists commanded the skies, collapsed buildings, killed police and fire personnel, and they were bringing doom to us all. I had to reach my kids. I had to bring them back home even as my mind shut out the reality that our simple, timber frame house could never protect us from terrorists and falling aircraft.

I tore along the Long Island Expressway like the desperate madman that I was at the time, yet I knew from radio reports that it would take an extended amount of time for me make my way home as all major and secondary roads leading into New York City were being cleared of all traffic to make way for emergency personnel and equipment. Sure enough, police officers soon redirected all traffic off the L.I.E., and I was forced onto a tertiary road. Some two-and-a-half hours later, I pulled into the school parking lot. Fifteen minutes later, I had my kids in the imaginary safe haven that was our home. “Imaginary,” since nowhere appeared to be safe on the day thereafter known simply as “9/11.”

When my wife finally came home late in the afternoon, she joined me in our living room, and together we watched replay after replay of the World Trade Center tragedy until we finally turned off the television in disgust. We felt like the media became death’s voyeurs as they offered image after image of the impacts, people falling, the towers collapsing, and then perhaps most haunting of all, playing the sound of fire department emergency locator beacons sounding the positions of first responders who were crushed dead within the rubble. We were at once numb, angry, depressed, frustrated and scared beyond belief.

Within the flaming debris that was the false sense of American security, we became seated at the grand table of sociopolitical commonality. America had the greatest opportunity since the start of World War II to discuss and resolve the entirety of her social, political and economic ills with a common element—its very survival—at the core.

All of us understood that we were perceived as the blasphemous denizens of an enemy state, and we would almost justify that dehumanization if we had failed to do what even a few lowly prey animals do in times of crisis. And what certain animals do is forget their rankings within their herds, temporarily band together and face the challenge of an enemy when threatened. Only after the common threat has been eluded or dealt with do the animals revert to their previously-established social dynamics, but if we wanted to show our true humanity, we’d have to do better than animals.

Unfortunately, as America emerged from the smoke and shadows in the uncertain days following September 11th, she drew forth a blade not sharpened by the national virtues of truth and justice but dulled and tarnished by lies and supposition, and she obstinately went to war against the wrong country. We needed to be more than animals, better than animals, and our campaign needed to yield a lasting peace from without and a true, lasting domestic tranquility. We needed to annihilate our foreign enemies, but we also needed to annihilate the poisons that divided America. Tragically, the divisions only widened.

Following the attacks, America was beset by alleged “patriots” who physically attacked Muslims at will even as they swore absolute loyalty to this nation and the peaceful ideals it stands for. The “patriots” conveniently forgot that America is the world’s racial, ethnic and religious “melting pot,” a kaleidoscope of the human kind, so they attacked innocent persons such as Sikhs and Hindus for inane reasons including (but not limited to) appearing to be like Muslims or just not looking “American enough” in their eyes. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant notes filled in-boxes on a daily basis. Political pundits vilified all Arabs and Muslims in order to further their anti-immigrant agendas. And there was more.

A defining moment in the first ten years following the attacks occurred on November 3rd, 2008. On that day, Senator Barack Obama won the presidency of the United States by winning the lion’s share of votes from black, Latino, and Asian voters, and he won a significant portion of votes from Caucasians as well. However, he did not win the majority of Caucasian votes, as that racial voting bloc was the only one of the charted races to give Senator John McCain any form of victory. There was a definite skew by race, and it showed that blacks and whites did not share the same vision of America’s future in percentages commensurate with other races. Please click the following link shows to see a chart of the racial preferences at work: How Groups Voted in 2008 | Roper Center for Public Opinion Research (cornell.edu).

I believe that if race played no part in election results, then the percentages afforded to Obama and McCain would’ve had the same relative evenness among all races as they did among Latinos, Asians, and “Other.” Accordingly, the votes cast by groups other than blacks and whites were based not on color but on the person they believed to be the best equipped to handle the job.

America, we blew it. Badly. I believe that in failing to seize the moment, in failing to reach commonality following the greatest national tragedy since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, in failing to come together as a society in times that all but demanded a cohesive national effort, we completely failed those innocents who died in the first American war of the 21st century. We now we stand in a nation largely divided along racial and political lines, and this was absolutely unthinkable in the flag-waving days following the attacks on September 11th.

We came so damn close to coming together as a cohesive whole, but just as we did in the years following World War II, we retreated from that which is the common good and embraced self-interest and the comfort of those whose race, ethnicity, and/or sociopolitical slant are similar to our own. We are again a divided nation, yet if we are to honor the thousands who died on September 11th, we need to understand that the differences between Americans don’t have to be liked, but they do have to be accepted, even if grudgingly so, if we are to join together to forge a better nation.

-TechRider