September 11 Through a 2020 Lens
Here we are at the 19-year mark of the attacks of September 11, 2001. It remains one of the most horrific intentional peacetime attacks on an unsuspecting population that the world has ever seen. 2,977 people died as a result. We continue to pause each year to read their names, to mourn again, ring bells and send beacons into the sky to honor all that were taken.
For anyone who was a witness to this anywhere, it was a society-altering event that changed us forever.
2020 has become the next one. The Coronavirus pandemic has claimed far, far more lives. 186,274 more lives as of the beginning of September. That would be sixty-four 9/11 attacks.
We are living in a horror show this entire year. While the vast majority of 9/11 deaths occurred immediately, the COVID-19 casualties mount exponentially as time passes. There’s no rubble to sift through, no Ground Zero landmark to visit and remember. This time, death slowly begins with a cough. And it can happen anywhere.
Coronavirus is a global 9/11 with the United States as its epicenter, numerically.
But unlike the days and months following the 9/11 attacks, the world has not rallied around us. We’re isolated, walled-off, shunned. It has been our national response to the pandemic that has left us alone in the world.
When we needed the world, they were there for us. When they needed us to do our part to respect their lives, we responded selfishly, choosing impatience, self-destruction, and personal freedom from preventative measures over the well-being of the world.
Perhaps it is the attacks of 9/11 that have precipitated this. After nearly two decades, the wounds of September 11th are still fresh, still unhealed. Perhaps they never will be. We are emboldened in our nationalism. We are fearful, paranoid, arrogant now. Our political divides have deepened, our partisan country divided. Blaming all others for our problems. The fear mongering. The xenophobia. All of it. It all has come from the seeds of horror that were scattered on that terrible day.
But healing doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember it. We have to. It’s part of the process. Just like all the stories that will come when we remember the trauma of 2020. This year has been a body slam. September 11th was a sucker punch. That’s incredibly hard to come to grips with.
That day is still crystal clear in my mind. It wasn’t the first “do you remember where you were when…” day of my life, nor will it be the last. But it was, by far, the most severe.
For those of us who lived through it, we all have stories to tell. Where we were, what we saw, how it affected us personally. For me, I was at work in Midtown Manhattan during the attacks. I was one of the lucky ones that day — there, but not really there. I was able to get home that day. So many were not. I post my story each anniversary in remembrance of all of those who started that day as I did, unaware of the inhumanity that was approaching. A day that changed us forever.
Here’s my original story, written a few years later, on September 11th.
It Was The Calmest of Days
I heard about the first plane hitting the tower at my coffee cart, of all places. After making my daily walk across town from Port Authority to 46th and 3rd, I couldn’t help but notice all of the commotion going on to my right, all the traffic and emergency vehicles speeding downtown. I saw smoke billowing into the air, but as it had just happened, it hadn’t been overwhelming –yet.
“A plane just flew into the World Trade Center,” the coffee guy told me. Naturally, I assumed that it was probably a small Cessna or something. It wasn’t until I got up to my office that I found out what had really struck the tower. At that point, most of our 12-person department had gathered in my boss’ office to watch the carnage on her TV. Although we were only a couple of miles uptown, we felt both safe and utterly vulnerable, each at the same time. Midtown, from a New Yorker’s point of view, is light-years away from the World Trade Center. But it’s really not so far in human distance.
There was a bizarre feeling of helplessness and isolation. While we watched gathered in that office, this horror was going on so close that you could smell it. We watched the replays, over and over, sharing whatever stunned thoughts we may have had with each other.
My wife was closer to the site — she was doing some freelance much further downtown. She saw the second tower fall from where she was. She wisely cleared out early, going back to our Weehawken, NJ apartment just across the river instead of staying where she was. I was lucky enough to briefly get through to my wife by phone, before the call was suddenly dropped, so at least we each knew we were both safe.
It took my office considerably longer to come to our senses and go home to our loved ones. Once we finally peeled ourselves away from the TV coverage, we found ourselves faced with the now daunting task of crossing the Hudson River. The bridges and tunnels had been closed, of course. How do you leave town?
The three Jersey people in our group left together; somehow we found out that they were using a makeshift ferry service to get people across to NJ. As we made our walk westward, we watched as others filed uptown, many covered with dust and ash. Everyone had the same faraway dazed look in their eyes. We were watching an exodus from Hell. No one said a word; none were sufficient.
I don’t even know where we boarded the boats that day, nor do I remember what type of boat it was. It may have been some sort of Circle Line type of tourist boat. We sat on the top deck, the three of us among the hundred or two others who, like us, had merely followed the stream of people to these charity boats. As the ship launched from the docks, all of our eyes were naturally fixated on lower Manhattan. One of the most striking things about it — and the entire journey beyond my office walls — was the silence. Apart from the sirens of emergency vehicles, the sound of the boat’s engine, and lap of the water against the hull, it was purely, hauntingly silent.
That silence lasted unbroken until we reached the Jersey side of the Hudson. From there, chaos reigned as everyone struggled to find which bus would take them closest to home. I had no such worry as the boats had docked less than a mile from my apartment. I helped my friends as best as I could to figure out where they had to go, and then I began to walk home.
Suddenly, I was alone for the first time since this day started.
The entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel was between where I was and where I had to go, and it was absolutely deserted. It had been closed to traffic, and somehow there was no one else there. So I found myself walking towards the Tunnel, on a typically congested thoroughfare, completely alone. It felt, quite appropriately, post-apocalyptic.
It didn’t take long to reach my apartment and my new wife, although it was an emotional eternity. We had been married for less than a month when the attacks happened. We’d only been back from our honeymoon for about two weeks, probably less. I can’t imagine what we would have done had this been on 9/01 rather than 9/11.
The calls and emails, when they could get through, brought in the important news. Our friends and loved ones had been accounted for. A friend couldn’t find a pair of shoes that she planned to wear that morning, so she was running extra late for work in her office in the South Tower. The devil may wear Prada, but I think her angel wears Nine West.
We found out later that my brother-in-law lost a friend in the collapse that day. Doug’s a strong man, a happy man, a resolutely positive man. Yet years later, at a holiday dinner, I saw this strong man fall apart as we briefly talked about that day.
My experiences of that day were nothing. To thousands of others, they were everything.
Now, my office is directly across the street from Ground Zero, this most hallowed of American ground. I can’t help but marvel at the sights around me every day. Not at this huge, gaping, national hole, but of the surviving neighborhood. It is unfathomable to me that my building — directly across the street from this carnage — is still standing.
But here I sit, every day in my 12th floor office, amazed that this could have happened right here, that so many could have perished that day, for doing nothing other than what I’m doing right now. I’m at work, and it’s the calmest of days.
