I'm going to be brutally honest in this one. Fuck it, I should write it sometime.
On 9/11/2001, my roomate woke me up about 20 minutes early - roughly 9:00. He and his new girlfriend, who up until 3 weeks previous had been an employee of Morgan Stanley [located in the 60's in the South Tower], were sitting horrified in front of the television. A plane had struck the North Tower tower. I gawked in rising from bed confusion - not understanding, still shaking off the night before. Within minutes a plane hit the south tower. I heard the explosion from my apartment, a low 3/4 of a mile away.
I gawked again. I went to shower. I came back, still somewhat confused and said this, "If this is pinned on the Palestinians, it's all over." First words out of my mouth that day. No shit. After all, the new intifada had just begun.
I walked to work as I always did then, from Rivington and Allen to Broadway and Houston - with a clear view of the towers the entire way. It still hadn't set in what happened. It was just another day with a beautiful blue sky on which something bizarre had occurred, maybe too bizarre to register.
When I reached the office, everyone was freaking out. As a freelance accountant and IT person, I have the liberty of coming in when I want - they'd all been there since 9:00. Our office has a clear view of the towers, and my desk was right by those windows.
While surrounded by an office full of people rightly freaking out, I set into my work. I went through my mail, I started dealing with cash receipts, I blocked it all out, until, from the corner of my eye, I saw one of the towers fall. Then I started to shake. My entire office stood in horror at the window by my desk at the plume, and then stood in horror again as we watched the North Tower fall not too long after.
Everyone left, including the owner, except for me and the model maker for the business. You see, I lived a 10 minute walk away, and all of the ethernet cards in our network fried from the power surge when the towers fell. I had to have our IT system operational by the next day.
At about 11:30, I went out to have a smoke and find a computer shop to buy a bunch of ethernet cards. I was surrounded by people bleeding, covered by ash, sitting on the stoop of the Deli next to the door to my building nursing their horror with a mid-morning beer. I, in shock, did the only thing I could think of doing at the time and went to buy more ethernet cards.
By the time I returned, I was sobbing - the suffering of the individuals passing. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what I could do. Who had made it out of the towers? Who had flead the collapse? Who, what, whatever. It was shock. It was all shock. And I thought of my good friend from grad school, who worked at Windows on the World, and was supposed to work that morning... and I wondered if she was alive.
Like some Joseph Conrad, rivet-loving character, I spent several hours installing ethernet cards. The model maker eventually left - he was as fucked up as I, but he lived in New Jersey and had no idea how he was going to get home - so he had stayed.
I walked home at around 3:30, stunned, cold, observing the hell around me. I talked to a friend, he was going on a citizen rescue mission. I later found out his rescue mission was chased away by the Tower 7 collapse - and he was almost killed by it.
I was impotent.
In the face of this,
like Brazil,
I did my job - a job that wouldn't have mattered, because the entirety of lower Manhattan was closed for the rest of the week.
"If they pin this on the Palestinians, it's all over".
I think about this thought again and again.
What 9-11 changed for me was abstract politics. I always was confronted with issues of poverty in this city - homelessness, desperation. But what 9-11 changed for me is the reality of America. It made me finally realize that chickens come home to roost, and that what you do comes back to you.
If we want to live in a just world, we must contribute to the conditions of a just world.
We cannot ever condone injustice, regardless of our interest.
We must live for peace.