I really wasn't planning to write anything about the fifth anniversary of this particular sad day, but I've (obviously) reconsidered. Lots of people are writing about September 11, 2001, and well they should. Many are taking the approach of an older generation ("Where were you when you heard Kennedy was shot?"), and I rather like that approach.
Where was I when I heard about the attacks? I was in the shower, getting ready to go to work.
My wife came in and said, "We're at war!"
What? Bullshit, I thought, and asked her what she meant. Her friend David had called from Chicago and told her what had happened. "We're at war," he told her. David wasn't being prophetic, just overreactive.
I got out of the shower and stood dripping in the living room, watching the images on the TV. I won't tell you what I felt. You've read elsewhere how people felt. I was no different.
Knowing David's penchant for exaggeration, I looked at the images and said, "What's he mean the towers are gone? They're right there!" Smoke was billowing out of both, flames here and there, but the towers were clearly not "gone."
And then, they were.
I'd been unknowingly watching recorded images of before they fell.
I went to work that day, but I don't know why. In shock, probably. And yeah... my eyes looked warily to the sky as I drove, before I shrugged off the paranoia.
I wrote three articles for my website over the ensuing weeks. I'll give you links to them, here.
The first article was written a mere five days later, for
The Atheist Attic, a section of my site on atheism and freethought issues. It's titled
Religion and Terrorism. A couple weeks later, I posted two more articles for other sections of my site.
Cardigan's Page of Wonder was a section devoted ostensibly to those things that make you go "hmm..." It's called
America the Bully.
Sage's Soapbox was the section of my site devoted to things that pissed me off, and that was the proper place for
The Pros and Cons of Patriotism. I re-read those articles tonight for the first time in years, and found that I'm still in agreement with what I said then. So feel free to check them out.
Like many people, I can't seem to "let go" of September 11th. Sure, I'll go days without giving it any thought whatsoever, but every six months or so, I get drawn in. I'll see a news article online referring to it, and the next thing you know, I'm watching the videos of the planes hitting the buildings... the buildings falling... the people running through the streets, covered in ash and soot... And I feel my heart pounding and my muscles tensing, just as I did the day I first watched it. Just, without the sense of shock and numbness.
I'm not aware of having lost anyone I knew in the attacks, but my friend Cris in Brooklyn lost six friends that day, several of them close friends. She watched the second plane hit the building, from her office, only about a mile and a half away. I can't even fathom what she must have felt.
To this day, I'm still deeply hurt by the day's events. I was remarking to Lucky earlier today that, for me, it probably wouldn't have had quite the same impact if it had happened in any other city. New York had always been "my" city... the only major city I actually enjoyed spending time in... a city I've felt an immense attachment to, probably because it was the chosen location for my first novel that I wrote in college. The terrorists certainly knew what they were doing. New York, in some ways,
is America. Maybe that's why I love it so much.
Like other bloggers, I'm still angry about it, too. I've never believed for one minute that our invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with a "War on Terror." I feel that 9/11 clearly shows the corruption of our current administration in their ability to pursue their own agenda under the guise of "national security." And I'm frustrated that more people don't see this. And I look forward to my birthday in 2009... Bush's last (partial) day in office. (Yes, I was born on "Inauguration Day," a fact that has caused me to have several unpleasant birthdays in my life.)
Well, this has been fairly rambling. I'm sorry I don't have any pithy little conclusion to this entry. But then, that would imply some sort of closure. And for this, there is none.
nyc
