9/11
It's 9/11 again, and my partner is flying. Or trying to. She is in her late 20s, which is young enough that she has no real memories of the event. I am in my mid 30s, which is old enough that I remember the day clearly.
"Some sort of issue - haven't taken off yet," she texts from the tarmac. Maybe technical, she implies.
"Probably better safe than sorry," I text back. Maybe a security thing, I don't add.
It is hard for me to communicate to her how the attacks of that day changed how we think, and how I worry.
I click over to the Fark thread from that morning, which was started when the first reports of an "explosion" at the World Trade Center were trickling in. It is a few hundred pages of text - an artifact of the early 2000s internet - a time long before live video streaming, and before images could be shared as widely as now. For some of you it might as well be teletype.
It is an excruciating read. It starts with curious speculation and naive concern. Then there's a gut punch of -- a second plane has hit the WTC! Rumors of disasters elsewhere in the nation abound. And then twin shocks - as the Towers collapse in sequence. The airspace closes. A hurried panic coalesces into rage.
Someone, a poster writes, needs to die.
The images and video came later, as they did back then. Is it even possible to tell you what it was like, to have these things dripped piecemeal into your consciousness -- like blows from a hammer, not the instant flood you'd get today. People chased by death through the streets of an American city like something out of a nightmare. Men and women covered in dust, debris, and human ash. The smokey haze that settled over lower Manhattan, which itself would kill people for years. Then, weeks later, a clear blue sky like an open wound.
I think of the eerie quiet in Spring 2020, when I was a resident physician - after the declaration of a pandemic emergency, but before the patient surge. A heavy dread settled over the hospital. I remember saying then that it reminded me of the week after 9/11, when we knew our lives would be cleaved neatly into a "before" and "after."
A few nights ago I watched the documentary titled What Went Wrong in Afghanistan, a CNN documentary about the war. In it, one of the war's commanders - McChrystal? Petreaus? I can't remember which -- suggests that we as a nation would have been better served if we had taken a full year after the attacks to educate ourselves and consider our options for response.
This, of course, was never going to happen. We wanted blood. So we invaded a land-locked central Asian country which hosted al Qaeda with a goal but the barest concept of a plan. How can I communicate that it made perfect sense at the time, that we saw this as a righteous fight - and we believed, given America's dominance of the 1990s, that our success was inevitable? Meanwhile, they saw us as just the latest foreign empire to invade and try to impose our will. People would die, there and elsewhere, for nearly 20 years.
I click over to NYT and see dozens killed in a bombing of a shelter. Another nation, traumatized, determined to repeat our mistakes. Push and pull, violence and revenge, action and reaction, seem almost inevitable.
I click over to Facebook. One of my friends is a survivor of the attacks. He started his dream job in the North Tower months before the event. He wordlessly posts the Survivor Tree (as he does every year). I post that I am thinking of him (as I do every year).