Ahoy,
I was under Astor Place, the subway stop next to two Starbucks and one of the last K-Marts in the city. I was coming into the city from Crown Heights to go to NYU for class. It was a Tuesday. Severe clear, as the pilots would say. All blue, all bright.
Never forget.
The train stopped in the station and the doors opened. I got off. People were coming down the platform, breathless.
“The World Trade Center is on fire,” a woman said as if she was commenting on the Starbucks being aflame. No urgency. Something bad happened, but we’d be fine. We had just dealt with a city-wide blackout. This was fine.
The train closed its doors and trundled off.
I came up and looked south. The tip of one of the buildings - a building I had visited with my sister a week before - was smoking. I turned away, then turned back. The second building was on fire.
Never forget.
I called my wife. We were newly married. She worked on Wall Street.
“Come up to NYU,” I told her. She said she would try.
I went upstairs and tried to call her again. Nothing. The phones were dead. I came back down, then back up. Nervously pacing the stairs. Then my friend Mike and I stood around watching the smoke.
“This is war?” I asked. He was older than me, knew more.
“Probably,” he said.
We stood in Washington Square Park looking south when both buildings fell, the craters a string of smoke pulled from the sky.
Never forget, right?
I met my wife in the stairs going up. She was coming down. She was looking for me. We went outside, tried to call my parents in Ohio, her parents in Poland. We both looked south in disbelief.
Smoke. The air smelled like construction dust and campfires.
We walked home: south, through Chinatown, then across the Brooklyn Bridge, then we caught a jitney at the Brooklyn Library. We stayed inside for a week.
My wife hasn’t forgotten.
She saw people jumping, heard the bodies hit. She felt the planes smack into history like a truck hitting her building, twice. She had PTSD, trauma, stress. 2001 broke her.
She’s better, now. But she doesn’t forget.
They say in the aftermath that New York was a nicer place. People were kinder to each other. That’s true, but it lasted for a minute.
We forgot.
We became a warmongering nation, a racist nation, a nation full of petty grievances turned into interstate spats. A nation of people that hated each other so much they would sic their attack dogs on each other - riots, Occupy, wage inequality, increasingly violent police, a president who boasted of having the biggest tower in downtown Manhattan on a day when 3,000 people died.
It started with a woman saying those buildings were on fire. It ended with the world on fire.
Never forget? We forgot.
What’s the old joke? Do you want pain? Because this is how you get pain.
Photo by Jesse Mills on Unsplash
So we watch the foolish wrap themselves in conspiracy, the fascists wrap themselves in the flag, the cruelest wrap themselves in the church. We see people sneering and fighting about the simple desire to prevent one 9/11 worth of deaths on a daily basis.
We watch Netflix while the West Coast burns.
And we ignore Europe protecting its people. China beating us in the vaccine race. Australia and Canada eradicating a threat that flares up in our cities with clockwork predictability.
We forgot.
A moment like 9/11 is a turning point, a time in which mettle is tested and wisdom is called forth. And we pulled together, for a minute. But we forgot those lessons. We didn’t create a Greatest Generation, we created the Whiniest. We created a world of enemies and cemented the arc of fear with a keystone called Trump.
Last night twin beams shot into the sky. I wanted to tell my kids to come out and look, but I didn’t. They’ll have plenty of years to experience this hopeless gesture. What’s the point of remembering the day that we forgot?
Best,
JB