Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy for President Obama. I believe this will resonate and speak a truth to voters that no amount of Fox News spin doctoring can scrub away:
Put in political terms, it could mean the end of the 2012 campaign. Obama did in three years what George W. Bush, despite all of his "dead or alive" big talk and swagger, couldn't do in seven years. These sorts of presidential moments can't be duplicated by candidates running against an incumbent.
But when I heard the news, I was surprised how empty I felt. Maybe because as a New Yorker, I've always resented the attempts to make 9/11 all about politics, and I knew we'd see a onslaught of talking heads saying asnine things.
And sure enough, we have.
Inside, be warned, a lot of pictures. And nearly a decade's reflection on my experience that horrible day viewed from a beautiful place.
©Class Photos
I live right across the East River from the site of the World Trade Center. There is a gorgeous neighborhood gem just steps from my door, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. This beautiful balcony with gorgeous views of the City was built to compensate the rich folk of Brooklyn for allowing Robert Moses to tear apart the rest of Brooklyn to make his expressway. The location has spectacular, panoramic views of Wall Street, the bridges, the East River and New York harbor. As such it's become an ubiquitous backdrop in films, TV and news reports, and also a popular site for tourists to take their "Here we are in New York City!" snapshots, like the one above.
On September 11, 2001. I awoke to Howard Stern show on my clock radio. A caller said that a plane had just flown into the World Trade Center. I must have had my alarm set for 8:45, as the first plane hit at 8:46. I turned on the TV and saw the second plane strike. I listened to reporters make odd speculation it was a air traffic controller's error and other silly things that didn't really make sense to me. Not that I had any better theories to offer about what was going on.
I went to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to see for myself.
It was mobbed.
© Jed Miller
We all watched, mostly in silence, as the Towers burned.
It was getting to be 10:00 am. I was thinking I should get going to work. This gives you a sense of how shell-shocked we all were, that I imagined that a workday was still on the agenda. Just then the first tower collapsed. It hadn't crossed my mind such a thing could happen.
I remember so clearly, an older woman, screaming as the Tower fell and her husband held her and tried to calm her. She was hysterical. The look in her eyes of pure terror and grief. It was like a scary movie, but it was real. I felt just oddly in shock. This can't really be happening?
I remember watching the cloud of debris and smoke rolling over the East River. I could see it coming at us, like a tsunami. It enveloped everything. I couldn't see the towers of Wall Street anymore, or the Brooklyn Bridge. All I could see was a cloud.
© Jonathan Maravilla
Yet we just stood there paralyzed at the horror we'd just witnessed, trying to comprehend what it all meant. How many lives had we just seen lost?
It was only when the flecks of concrete, drywall, and mortar came down on my face did I think to leave. It stung. It genuinely hurt. And that pain brought the realization it probably wasn't a good thing to be breathing either. I, like most, turned to home.
But I couldn't stay cooped up and I wandered to visit some nearby friends. Papers reigned down on the neighborhood, contracts, faxes, balance sheets. Wall Street workers poured over the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, into our streets, like refugees. Their faces were covered in ash, I still get chills on Ash Wednesday when I cross paths with a Catholic.
We, like many others, sojourned to a Red Cross office in the area. We knew as gay men they didn't want our blood, but still, we wanted to do something. Turns out they didn't need it anyway. Across the city, hospitals, clinics and doctors braced for wounded who mostly never showed. The dead were many, the wounded very few.
To hear statistics is one thing. But to live here and have seen the evidence is another thing entirely. Over the next few days, it seemed the flyers of the missing were everywhere.
It was deeply upsetting to see the pure volume. And yet, I couldn't look away. I'd stop at the walls and read them. I'd wonder about the people, I'd hope they'd show up and be ok. I don't think anyone really believed they would. The poster, too was just trying to do something.
The thing I found most disconcerting was how happy everyone looked in their photos. Which is natural, you "smile for the camera." You take pictures at birthday parties and weddings and other happy occasions. And you discard those that aren't flattering, and you only hang on to the ones that show you in your best light. When you're happy. When you're radiant. When you're full of life. They are the selected moments of your life that you'd most like to remember.
So many happy times. So many birthdays and weddings behind them, and none before them. The smiling faces of the gone haunted me for months.
© Debonair Dude
Contemplating the incredible losses suffered by our uniformed heroes was even harder to bear. Well over 350 men and women rushed toward danger to help others and paid with their lives. For a year crowds would break out in spontaneous applause when a Firetruck drove by. It wasn't much comfort, I'm sure, but it was something.
Days after the attack, I joined my neighbors again at the Promenade to share grief at a evening candlelight vigil. Within the week, someone brought a framed picture of the Towers, and bolted it directly to the fence. It was the view that was lost. It stayed there for many years. You can see how weathered it became.
© Pictures of my Life
Someone removed the framed picture fairly recently. I suppose it was the City. I miss it.
I remember going down there one night, maybe early October 2001. I sat on the bench and looked at the empty sky. I just starting crying, and I don't actually do that a lot. I cry easily at movies, my friends tease me. But spontaneously at real life? No, not really. It's weird. An older man, came over and asked me if I was OK. I'm sure I spit out something and gestured to the void. He knew. We didn't talk. I really couldn't, I was now the hysterical one. He just sat with me until I composed myself and it took a while. Even as he did nothing, even as he said nothing, he had extended an extraordinary kindness to a stranger. I have never crossed paths with him again. I have no idea who he was. But I remember his kindness fondly. There were many kind moments during that time.
We've since had the beautiful, poignant tribute of lights.
© Vinny from Brooklyn
I've always enjoyed them immensely. It's just a beautiful sight. Where once there was a painful void, there was for just a moment beautiful light streaming Heavenward.
I miss the Towers. I know they're just buildings. But they never are just buildings, are they? They're grand expressions of ideas. Walter Chrysler and Alfred Smith were really just trying to tell the world whose was bigger when they raced to build the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, respectively. It wasn't about creating office space.
The Towers too became a target because they were a symbol of both American ideals, and also American arrogance. The ideals being expressed were we could bring the World together and that through Trade we would all prosper together. And the arrogance is that New York City should be the Center of the World and that prosperity was the World's highest goal. Trade and commerce were the one true values that all the World should look up, all 110 stories in fact. Our country doesn't like to look closely at the question of arrogance. I wish we would.
I grew up in the suburbs of Lansing, Michigan. As a child it excited me so much to go "downtown" Lansing. We could see buildings, big buildings. This is the quaint perspective of a child, the tallest building in Lansing is probably about 15 stories, and there were handful of tall buildings. It was no Metropolis.
In the 70s, my parents encouraged my interest and shared their Time magazine stories chronicling the building of the tallest buildings in the world. They took me to New York to see them when I was 12. They had just opened.
I dreamed that someday, I'd live in such a sprawling Metropolis. A utopia that teemed with so much life, people could only be stacked on top of each other to fit them all in. And that day came in April 1993, when I moved to New York City. And I never regretted it.
The Towers became another expression of New York City's famous, tactless chutzpah. And they could be seen from where ever you were in the City. You could look up and use them for navigation, like a pair of North Stars. And each time I did it was like a little reminder, yeah, I'm here. I'm in New York Fuckin' City. When I traveled, I could see them from a great distance on the turnpikes, and I'd know was almost home.
© Yutaka Tsutano
But New York has changed, and not just the skyline. When I arrived it seemed to be such an expansive, beckoning playground, calling to everyone, "Join the party!" Of course, I was young and hot and all the lights were always green. The people were fearless and I always found enthusiastic company on even my boldest, perhaps even ill-advised, adventures.
After 9/11 the streets were filled with National Guardsmen, rifles in hand, ominously protecting the peace. The 24-hour party town went full-on Orwellian. A pallor settled on faces in the town that never fully left. And I must still occasionally wait for stranger to paw through my messenger bag before I am granted the convenience of boarding the A Train. Gone are the days of easily dropping by a friend's office for lunch. It seems you just can't get in anywhere anymore.
It's possible the biggest changes are really just inside me.
But we can't deny Bin Laden changed the country, too. We're now reminded constantly we must be afraid. And, I think what may have been left of our naive, youthful exuberance took it's last breath, as well. The idea of actually selling our ideas of free market capitalism and freedom was finally totally abandoned for the new pragmatic cynicism. Now, we delivery the ideas by NATO. And the receivers are expected to thank us for liberating them from tyranny, or for having to carry the burden of deciding their own fates. And I don't see that changing. I never saw our country take a breath, and say, "How did we happen to get here?" George W. Bush told us, "They hate us for our freedoms." That seems to be the last serious reflection we had on that topic.
© Vincent Desjardins
I contemplated leaving the City. Some of my friends did. I became obsessed with following in great detail all the minutia of any piece of news of what might rise from the ashes at Ground Zero. After a while, I began to lose interest and it scarcely pegs on my radar anymore. Maybe because it was just taking too damn long. Or maybe I realized, whatever rose, it couldn't possibly begin to replace what we'd truly lost. The Towers were gone. We were implored to "Never forget," even as the Towers' images are scrubbed from the opening credit sequence of Sex & The City and the movie posters for the blockbuster Spider-Man flick.
But the people were gone, too. And unlike Hollywood, we couldn't scrub the remnants of them from our lives and just carry on like they were never there.
And America chose a path, one I didn't agree with in 2001, but we haven't veered a step away from it in the time since.
I go to the Promenade far less than I used to. I avoided it altogether for a long time. I try to resist "letting the terrorists win," and allowing Bin Laden to ruin what used to be a favorite place for me. But it's still sad to look up at the void. And it's very hard to avoid the associated memories of what I saw there that day.
I've cried. I've mourned. I've cursed. But, as well as anyone can, I found some peace.
There was a time I would have gladly ripped Osama Bin Laden's throat out myself with my bare hands for what he's done to our City, for what he's done to me.
But, I never signed on to the idea that Osama Bin Laden was this omni-powerful boogeyman and America would never be safe so long as he lived. I never thought we needed to tear up Afghanistan, Iraq, our Constitution and constantly expand our footprint of war just to get one man. America has, itself, only compounded the tragedy of 9/11 exponentially, and in perfect accordance with Bin Laden's expressed plan.
I'm glad he's met with justice, even as primitively as it was dispensed.
But doesn't begin to balance the losses we've suffered and I'm not convinced we'll ever truly be any "safer." They got us with box-cutters.
And this doesn't fill the void that remains still in our skyline. And certainly not the void left in so many people's lives. Not in the least. Because nothing really can. If closure comes, it will come as it always does, when one accepts the loss, and finds a way to move on. Extracting revenge and retribution is not an inextricable part of that process. If it brings the aggrieved comfort, I am happy for them. For myself, Osama Bin Laden, became but one man, a symptom of a problem. The problem remains as unaddressed now as it was in 2001.
© Hive
This is Obama's victory, there's no doubt. It absolutely makes things better for him in 2012. But I can't view this only through the prism of electoral politics. And I just won't.