New Yorkers still on edge 16 years after 9/11
NEW YORK: It’s a typical late summer weekend in New York’s Times Square, and tourists from around the world are snapping pictures beneath the commercial hub’s iconic neon billboards – watched closely by a heavy contingent of police.
Four cruisers are parked in the middle of the busy intersection, and pedestrian zones have been surrounded by barriers to stop cars from ramming the crowd, a mode of attack favoured by violent extremists in recent years.
“I don’t like to come to places like this,” says Sue Garcia, a massage therapist from Brooklyn. “Or anywhere where incidents have happened repeatedly – the fear comes to mind.”
Fear of an attack. Fear of another 9/11, the deadliest terrorist assault in history, when almost 3,000 lives were extinguished, many in the rubble of the World Trade Centre.
For New Yorkers who lost loved ones, narrowly survived or just witnessed the event, memories remain fresh and old wounds are reopened on its anniversary.
And a perpetual state of high alert is the new normal.
Garcia, now 33, was a high schooler when the planes slammed into the Twin Towers.
She saw them burn, then collapse, and walked all the way home like hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers that day after metro services were suspended.
“I was there, I saw it over and over again, I don’t need to think about it,” she says.
Twice in recent years, catastrophe loomed. In May 2010, police discovered a car packed with explosives and primed for carnage.
In May, a mentally ill ex-soldier deliberately drove his sedan into 23 pedestrians, killing a young American tourist.
The episodes of anxiety described by Garcia are a burden borne by many New Yorkers.
For those directly affected, the anniversary of the attacks are the “most dreaded date” of the year and post-traumatic stress can remain for an individual’s entire life, says Charles Strozier, a psychoanalyst and author of a book that documents the experiences of survivors and witnesses.
“There was collective trauma, the sense of having been proven to be not invulnerable.
“To say that New Yorkers are still traumatised is an exaggeration. But they think about it, they are aware of it, they do have active fears just below the surface of consciousness about things like bombs in the subways,” adds the professor, who watched the destruction of the World Trade Centre from his office just off Union Square.
Many are also convinced that, even though recent terror attacks have focused on Europe, it is New York, the beating heart of the Western world, that remains the prime target.