story23.xml

story23.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-01-30

I teach at a large university, and on the morning of 9/11
I was in a Department meeting until 11:00. I'd heard on the
way to work about a "small plane" hitting the World Trade
Center, but at that point the radio announcer had not
sounded alarmed.

Toward the end of our meeting a colleague walked in and
whispered something to the Dept chair. I'll never forget
him announcing that the twin towers had been hit by two
airplanes and "collapsed." I thought he must mean that the
*planes* had collapsed, not the towers. But then he said
that 50,000 people worked at the WTC, and I realized that,
somehow, beyond comprehension, the buildings themselves
had crumbled.

My wife works on the other side of campus, and as I walked
down the avenue toward her building I was in a daze, trying
to fathom what this meant. I didn't realize at the time
that many people had had the chance to escape the towers
before they fell, and I kept thinking that this was the
equivalent, in a single day, of virtually all the soldiers
we lost in the Vietnam War. And in the midst of my dismay
I thought ahead to how the Bush administration would use
all of this to push its military agenda--that we would
now be sunk in that agenda for years, and billions of
dollars, all in the name of protecting U.S. security and
supremacy.

Though I am a long-lapsed Catholic, I stepped into a church
on the way to my wife's office. There was nobody inside,
and I sat down to think, to imagine, to mourn. All that
death. All that awful death and destruction.

We drove through the thick traffic to pick up our son at his
school, and returned home to watch the recurring images.
Over and over the planes hit, the towers fell. The
announcers droned on, struggling for words, for metaphors
and analogies. "Attack on America." "America's New War."
The ideological machine was geering up, moving forward
already, telling the public what to think and who to blame.

It was impossible to sleep that night. Impossible to do
anything but place myself, again and again, inside those
buildings and inside those planes, living in nightmarish
fantasy what for others had been real. What could be
said? It was loss, utter loss, and no war would bring
anyone back.