On the morning of September 11, 2001, as I got in my car to drive to work, I had a strange feeling that the date, September 11, was important somehow, but I couldn't think of the reason why. Was it an important anniversary? A friend's birthday? Did I have an appointment after school that day that I'd forgotten about?
I was on the late teaching schedule at my school (a large academic high school in Queens), periods 5-12, so my first class wasn't until 10 a.m. I usually got to school around 9, give or take depending on traffic. I first heard the news of the first plane hit, described on the radio as a "commuter plane," as I was approaching the school. By the time I found a parking space and got out of the car to walk to the building, I could see black smoke in the southern sky.
I went inside and told the ladies in the office what I had just heard on the radio, then went upstairs to our 6th-floor cafeteria to get a better look. The school is located about 6 miles north of lower Manhattan, very near the East River; the 6th-floor caf has a panoramic view of the city. I looked to the south and saw smoke pouring out of the top of Tower 1. As I walked toward the south-facing windows to join a group of teachers and students gathered there, Tower 2 erupted into flames. I thought I was watching a scene from Die Hard, or countless other action pictures. What I didn't know at the time was that this was the second plane hit.
None of us knew what had happened. Then as more people trickled in and reported what they'd heard, it slowly became clear that this was a terrorist attack, not an accident. I couldn't help but think of the people in those buildings, people I knew who might be working there or nearby, and one friend in particular who was a probationary firefighter and had just finished his training. The awfulness of it was almost overwhelming, and this was before anyone thought the towers might come down.
Then something happened that I'll never forget.
Someone came into the room; to this day I have no idea who he was. He was probably a new teacher in the building whom I hadn't met yet, and never got to know before I left the school two months later (a monumental mistake in retrospect, but that's a story for another day). Anyway, he took one look out those south-facing windows at those burning towers six miles away and said something that is seared in my memory forever:
"See? That's why you've got to vote Republican."
I remember thinking that this was about the least appropriate thing to say I could imagine at that moment, but I don't remember if I said that out loud. I don't remember if I said anything. I don't remember if it occurred to me then or later that at that particular moment, we had a Republican president, a Republican Congress, a Republican governor and a Republican mayor. We had, in fact, taken this person's advice and voted Republican the last time we had chosen our national, state and local leaders. And look.
Whether there's any validity to the idea that voting Republican (or Democratic, for that matter) is a sure-fire way to prevent things like this from happening is beside the point. And I'm certainly not here to debate the extent to which either party or its leaders were at fault or blameworthy for failing to prevent the attacks.
I came to realize years later what was going through this person's mind when he said those words. It marked, for me anyway, the beginning of an era in which more and more Americans came to view absolutely everything, everything that happened both in the present and the past, through the lens of whether or not it validated their voting preference, and if it didn't, reframing and reconceiving it so they could think about it as if it did. From 9/11 on, everything was taken as proof that you should vote Republican (or Democratic).
Maybe I'm naïve, or maybe I wasn't paying as much attention, but it seems to me that before 9/11 most people understood that the world, history, current events, etc. don't always validate our desire to vote for one party or the other. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. No political cohort or party has a monopoly on success or correctness, no political cohort or party has historically gotten everything right (or wrong), and no political cohort or party is right (or wrong) about everything today.
I think this person, and others who have followed in his footsteps, did and continue to do themselves and the country a grave disservice. By looking at everything as validation for one's chosen party affiliation, we prevent ourselves from understanding not only the issues of the day, and our shared history, but also each other. Voting for one party or another is not an end in itself. Voting for one party or another is supposed to be the reason why things happen, not the other way around.
It makes me a little sad that this is what I think of every time September 11th rolls around. I also remember trying to teach my first lesson that morning, but finding both myself and the students unable to concentrate and just turning on the radio to hear the latest news. I remember our having to place school security officers at the south-facing hallway windows, to prevent students from crowding there to look at the carnage. I remember a few kids looking out those windows and laughing at the smoke hovering above the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. I remember telling students that they needed to stay in the school building unless their parents came to pick them up; it was the safest place for them, they were no safer anywhere else in the city, and they were accounted for, meaning everyone knew where they were. I remember the principal suggesting we might have to put some kids up for the night if mass transit remained shut down. I remember staying in the building until 6 pm with teachers and students, watching the only local TV channel that was still broadcasting over the air, thanks to a backup transmitter on top of the Empire State Building. I remember driving home on the Grand Central Parkway, expecting nightmare traffic but finding the roads eerily empty; I think I got home in less than half an hour. And I remember the next morning, with school cancelled, watching on my PC the footage of the airliners, with all those people in them, striking those buildings, with all those people in them, and finally weeping for all that had been lost.