A Look Back At September 11th (or The Week Football Stopped®)

This is how I'd like to remember lower Manhattan

Six years ago, I was living and working in San Francisco. I was a little over a year into my job at Blue Shield of California after graduating business school and was (mostly) enjoying my 30th year in 2001. The evening of Monday, September 10th was spent watching Ed McCaffrey break his leg and end his career on Monday Night Football. I had some early morning meetings to get to the next day and I turned in pretty early.

I was awakened at 6:30 am Tuesday morning September 11th to the phone ringing. In my daze and fog, I stumbled over to the phone and noticed it was my mom calling from Buffalo. She had a habit of conveniently forgetting about the 3-hour time difference between the Bay Area and Buffalo and loved to call me in the morning to make sure I was up. I ignored the ringing phone and hopped in the shower, figuring I'd call her back on my way into work.

The phone kept ringing as I went through my morning routine. Finally, on the sixth call while I was shaving, I realized that something was wrong...she would never call over and over like this. I wiped my face and picked up the phone and heard the fateful words:

"Turn on the TV. The World Trade Center has been attacked"

I switched on the TV, sat on the couch and watched with my jaw on the floor at the image of both towers of the World Trade Center smouldering while apocalyptic messages filled the crawl at the bottom of the screen ("PENTAGON ATTACKED", "U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING BOMBED"). I've only been watching for a minute or so when the South Tower of the WTC, a building that's been an iconic part of the NYC skyline for 28 years, collapsed. To call it surreal and unthinkable doesn't even come close to the sensation I (and most people watching it on TV) felt. The only thing I can compare it to is if someone told you the sun would extinguish tomorrow morning and you saw it live on TV.

I spent most of September 11th, 2001 on my couch, half-riveted to the news unfolding as the day progressed and half on the phone, calling everyone I knew who lived or worked in mid & lower Manhattan. My best friend worked near the WTC site and he was the only one I couldn't reach...I eventually caught up with him in the late afternoon. He had been one of the thousands who walked acrosss the Brooklyn Bridge to Brooklyn and was in a bar chatting up a girl.

I eventually got off my couch and ventured outside. Everyone looked like they were in the same state of shock as me. In short order, I gave blood, walked by my office (which had been closed in the morning as a precaution), had a sandwich and called my brother, with whom I hadn't spoken in 2 years. It's pretty pathetic that it took a national tragedy of this magnitude to get us talking again, but there you go.

It's popular in some circles to use as a mantra, "9/11 changed everything". I don't particularly subscribe to that bumper-sticker thinking, but there is little doubt that our society, our culture, our way of life have been forever changed. The confidence we used to exude, the blind faith we enjoyed in our lives, the utter joy of being an American is dented. What seemed to be important arguments now pale in consideration of the 3,000 innocent lives still buried under tons of rubble at Ground Zero.

The last six years have been, for me, a blur of authoritarian aggression, from the fictitious war in Iraq to the the suspension of Constitutional protections here. "9/11" has been used as justification for every hare-brained operation the administration has mounted, but we've quickly forgotten what we felt in the immediate aftermath. Writing this post takes me back to the days after September 11th, 2001. The world rallied to our side and we enjoyed an outpouring of support and love that we hadn't felt since the end of World War II. While we wondered if we'd ever be able to laugh and sing again, people around to world stood with us and, by virtue of the weight of their experiences, told us it would be alright. The Israeli who's witnessed six bus explosions in the past decade. The Irish kid whose father was killed by English soldiers during the Troubles. A Spanish couple who lost their daughter to a Basque terroist attack in Barcelona a decade ago. A Filipino woman whose husband was abducted and likely killed by the Abu Sayyaf terrorists near Manilla. And on and on and on...

We as Americans do not hold a patent on misery and suffering, even though we sometimes act like we do. We're just recent entrants. Six years? We're mere infants in the mass-wave-of-death anniversaries compared to our brethren in the U.K and France.

I'll spend this day with a thought for the innocent lives lost on 9/11/01. But my mourning is reserved for the lives lost since in the service of a criminal administration. And most of all, I miss seeing those two skyscrapers dominate the New York City skyline.