20 years after 9/11, new catastrophes to ride out

The phone call woke me up. I groggily picked up. It was my then-boyfriend, now husband, who was already on his way to work by the time planes crashed into the World Trade Center. “Turn on the television,” he said.

In turn, I called my parents: “America’s under attack!”

Horror struck; many of us watched as the towers fell. Later that morning, I rushed to The Chronicle, pitching in on the first draft of history, even as I worried about what lay ahead and if and when I might see my loved ones again if downtown San Francisco also came under attack.

Do you remember where you were that day? The fear and confusion, the frantic calls to friends and loved ones, the sorrow over the people lost? Bay Area heroes of that day included flight attendant Betty Ong, the first to alert authorities to the hijackings, and Mark Bingham, among those who hatched a plan to storm the cockpit and retake Flight 93 from hijackers.

Saturday, Sept. 11, is the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. The past two decades have felt like an eternity, yet also passed in a blink, a breath, a sigh.

I asked Didi and Gege, who are 10 years old, what they knew about the date. They know that terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and another possibly targeted the U.S. Capitol before crashing in a field, but not much more.

My husband pointed out that the tragedy happened 10 years before they were born. Asking our boys about it was akin to asking us, back when he and I were in elementary school, about the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. We’d heard about his death but lacked historical context.

In the third grade, my sons read a children’s book about Sept. 11. Paging through it now, I see that it only vaguely alludes to why the terrorists targeted the United States. The text states they felt the country was trying to “destroy Islam” but does not elucidate the roots of this anger.

We tried, haltingly, to explain those origins, and how the Sept. 11 attacks in turn led to the present-day chaos in Afghanistan, but each tug of the thread unraveled still more complications; so, too, with trying to explain the whys and wherefores of many of the unfolding, overlapping calamities lately.

Climate change has whipped up extreme weather from coast to coast: massive wildfires in the West; Hurricane Ida, which left many without power or clean water in Louisiana; and flooding in New York that drowned people in their basement apartments.

Last week, Texas passed a restrictive anti-abortion law that foreshadows other battles to come across the country.

Each of these disasters hit the poorest and most vulnerable hardest and served as another wake-up call of sorts. As with

Sept. 11, nothing that happened came about overnight; nor will any one solution quickly fix our long-percolating, long-lasting problems.

If I had to gauge our collective mood right now, I’d guess we’re at a low — a low that feels even worse because the end of the pandemic seems to be endlessly receding. It’s terrifying to consider how each new variant could become wilier, particularly if resistance to vaccines persists.

The World Health Organization just announced it may begin naming new strains after constellations, once the agency cycles through the Greek alphabet’s 24 letters. And we’re already up to mu.

The International Astronomical Union recognizes 88 constellations, ranging from the familiar ones such as Andromeda and Sagittarius, to the esoteric Tucana (toucan) and Corvus (crow.)

The ancients invented constellations to make sense of the night skies, to find patterns and stories in the stars, and to navigate across dark seas — hoping for land, hoping to survive.

May we too find a way through the cataclysms that beset us now.

Nothing that happened came about overnight; nor will any one solution quickly fix our long-percolating, long-lasting problems.