The lessons of 9/11 were wasted on us
Living with an up-and-at-’em named Jonathan, I kept earlier hours in those days, which in a warped way made me lucky. When the world changed – or seemed to change – I was actually awake.
I was halfway through my first cup of coffee. On the then-ordinarysounding 11th of September 2001, we were apartment-sitting for my parents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A few minutes before 9am, [my partner] Jonathan noticed an odd, opaque report online and turned on the TV. Sure enough, some stupid plane had flown into the World Trade Centre, and smoke from the hole was billowing.
“How dumb would a pilot have to be?” I said with an eyeroll.
“The Trade Centre is bigger than a breadbox. Probably some guy in a private plane staring at his instruments instead of looking up at the windshield. What a mess. That hole will take months to fix.”
It would take more than months to fix. And the hole was in my stomach when we watched a second plane hit the South Tower in real time. Jonathan’s and my mutual apprehension was instantaneous: this was not an accident.
I’m not a reporter, but I am a voyeur. I instinctively wanted to head downtown to look at the damage myself. Jonathan thought the idea was ridiculous. I saddled up my bicycle anyway, but – fatefully – acceded to a second cup of coffee first.
My partner the foreign policy wonk was already muttering some Arabic name I’d never heard of, Osama whatever. Once news came in of another hijacking and a crash into the Pentagon, he was certain of the culprit. I’d the distinct sense that matters had been going on for quite some time, to which I hadn’t paid sufficient attention.
When the South Tower dropped in a single motion like a collapsible coffee cup, I screamed. I wasn’t being melodramatic. The shriek was involuntary. The skyscraper seemed to simply disappear, as in a magic trick. Within half an hour, as if to convince a sceptical audience, the North Tower performed the same trick. I’d been a little mean about those twin towers, having dismissed them as geometrically “unimaginative”. Yet they’d been part of my landscape since my family moved to New York in 1975. Too late, I realised that even if I didn’t consciously admire them, I was used to them, and sheer familiarity can form as strong a bond as love.
Remember, that morning no one had any idea how many more assaults on the United States were still to come. For Jonathan and myself, the infrastructure of our whole lives felt suddenly unmoored. Everything we took for granted as solid and durable was revealed as fragile and fleeting. The very floor of that apartment seemed to sway, as if we weren’t on the fifth floor of a sturdy century-old apartment block, but on a raft in the high seas. I’ve never been so aware of living in history as it’s being made. I’ve never felt so foolish for having perceived “history” as in the past, and the present as static. Afghans would have been way ahead of me.
Those folks know the true nature of the present: lithe, coiling and capricious like a live, crackling electrical cable. The present can veer into the murderous on a dime. I rang my parents at their home upstate. My father couldn’t hear me, because as ever their classical music station was blasting all over the house.
“I said: ‘Turn on the TV! The World Trade Centre has fallen down’.” I must have been shouting partly to get through to myself.
It was no day for solitary reconnaissance on a bike. Hand-inhand, Jonathan and I walked down the bike path on the West Side. We didn’t talk. Sirens wailing, emergency vehicles streaked down the deserted West Side Highway – in only one direction. Many other pedestrians joined us on this pilgrimage.
No one else talked, either. A plume rose from the end of the island and trailed for miles over the river. As the crowd advanced and enlarged, the air grew acrid, and grey powder dulled the Hudson Greenway’s floral landscaping.
We were all polite – a touch embarrassed, quiet, but sometimes nodding to one another and, unusually, meeting one another’s eyes.
Our procession was allowed as far as Greenwich Street, where behind the cordon a vast pile of slag loomed, smoking, three storeys high.
Observers took their turns for a minute or two of silence, then ceded their places graciously to others.
The smartphone generation would find it astonishing, but no one was taking photographs. Most of these New Yorkers were probably secular, but this was a religious moment, a funereal moment. We were paying our respects.
That day and for weeks thereafter, there was a feeling in the city that I sometimes call up in awe. Everyone was kind. Strangers spoke on the street. All our distinctions – race, sex, political affiliation – fell away. We all seemed to remember at once that we had more in common with one another than we differed. We were all participants in the same improbable American project. As an individual, I felt small, but I also felt part of something enormous. This vast country seemed like a single place.
That sense of solidarity has evaporated. Twenty years later, the US is cleaved into vicious warring factions. The country is once more divided into red and blue states, and geographically we suffer more from political segregation than the racial kind. The Trump era heightened this undeclared civil war, through which the fact that Democrats and Republicans were citizens of [the same] nation seemed a mere technicality; both sets of antagonists carrying the same colour passport reduced to freakish coincidence.
The age of Trump turned these allegiances profoundly personal, too. Partisans dox [reveal private information about] the other side’s children online, harass foes in their homes and scream at politicians just trying to have a quiet meal at a restaurant. More than we ever hated al-qaeda or Bin Laden, we hate each other. The shared experience of wounding in 2001 awakened a dormant national pride even in people like me, who’d never thought of themselves as especially patriotic. We remembered that, whatever its flaws, there was still a great deal about the United States that we loved, believed in and felt called to defend. In residential neighbourhoods all over the country, the Stars and Stripes flew on porches.
But now, displaying an American flag has gone back to signalling political conservatism. Worse, in universities, corporations and public schools, Critical Race Theory demonises the “whiteness” of 60 per cent of the population, and in elite circles loathing for our own country is a badge of nobility.
No one seems aware any longer that there’s such a thing as a hostile external power that poses a graver threat to our existence than in-house “systemic racism” or “microaggressions”. In the Biden administration, our generals have been fixated not on international threats, or even on getting our troops safely out of Afghanistan, but on routing out “white rage” in our own soldiers.
Biden himself has encouraged our intelligence community to switch their focus from Islamist terrorism to domestic extremists on the Right.
However dreadful to contemplate, perhaps another assault on a similarly shocking scale would still stir the same grief, social cohesion and return to first principles. But absent such a kick-in-the-pants refresher, we’ve gone back to being petty, acrimonious, small-minded, myopic, self-involved and naive.
Whatever the lessons of 9/11, they were wasted on us.
‘Our whole lives felt suddenly unmoored. Everything that we took for granted as solid and durable was revealed as fragile and fleeting’