story444.xml

story444.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-04-20

Perhaps before September 11, 2001, Americans? collective sense of safety was larger, as we felt somewhat cocooned by our freedom, good will, and general wealth. As horrific as the terrorist attacks and that which led to them are, there may well be a few good things that result. The tragedy jolted many citizens in this country to realize that we are indeed very connected to the world; that our power is potent enough to create great good, and great disharmony, and that the choice is with us, The People. Some were shocked to discover that there are people who hate us so much that they would kill themselves to harm us. My hope is that, instead of fearing more and using our resources only to protect us from hatred, we also use them to prevent hatred from growing in the first place. I want us to think long-term about whom and how we support, whom we don?t aid, and what the true costs to our policies are
---their affects on the increasingly smaller world stage. And, more locally, more tangibly, I hope that neighbors continue to look one another in the eye, that strangers are prompted to speak to one another in the grocery line, that we teach our children not to hate, that we rekindle the humanity every day that was challenged during the darkest of hours.

At 8:56 on September 11, 2001, I was in bed in our small studio apartment in Greenwich Village, in Manhattan. I was awake, but the disrupted sheets showed evidence of sleep and a night punctuated by our 8-month-old son, Kolter. I lay next to him, his eyes still heavy with slumber. My husband, Steve, had left the apartment several minutes earlier, to run an errand for me in Midtown. The unusually loud drone of a plane overhead caused me to sit up, then to get out of bed and reflexively look out the window and into the courtyard, even though I knew I wouldn?t be able to see anything. My view was of other 4-story brick buildings like ours, a sycamore tree whose branches reached to our third-floor windows, and our fire escape. Despite the fact that the sound of engines was now long past, I still looked skyward. Maybe in the small patch of blue above I?d see smoke, buildings toppling, or some other more subtle reason for my discomfort. Seeing nothing and desperate for a mundane reason for the noise, I paused to recall some low-flying military aircraft that once, a long time ago, had been that alarming. But this was different; I don?t know why.

I found the remote and flipped on the TV. All that was visible was snow---that flirtatiously jumping static that sometimes even bunny ears won?t fix, though how we try. Every channel but one was indecipherable. We didn?t have cable, so nearly all of our reception was dependent on the antennae atop one of the World Trade Center towers. Something important that I couldn?t see was happening not very far away. The towers were a mere twenty blocks south.

I began to move more quickly and turned on the radio in midstream of a commentator stating that a plane had hit one of the towers. It wasn?t known at that point if it had been an accident or not. The half-visible TV channel showed fumbling reporters, uncharacteristically distraught while delivering the news.

I called my husband on his cell phone and told him to come back downtown and why. I called a friend of ours who I knew would be leaving New Jersey to commute into the city at about that time. He didn?t know that all bridges and tunnels would be closed. Kolter was now awake and I fed and played with him, caught between our daily routine and a growing sense of dread. The usually unheeded moments of normal, predictable life receded into the magnified attention to everything as it happens, when things take a volatile turn. Kolter?s everyday expressions of hunger, joy, and impatience took on a certain degree of preciousness.

When Steve got back we three stood together in the center of our apartment and waited, not knowing what to do. He didn?t describe to me the sight of the burning towers, which he must have watched on his drive downtown; he didn?t say a word. In a few moments there was screaming in the street below us. Steve knew what this meant, but I hadn?t yet put it all together. We raced downstairs and into Sullivan Street, where many people were standing or sitting in their cars, looking southward at what was now only one burning tower. We looked and looked and didn?t believe what we saw. It was impossible that these mammoth icons, part of a landscape I had imprinted behind my eyes since childhood; buildings in which I had recently danced, at Windows on the World; symbols of American ingenuity and dominance, could simply disappear. In grasping for sense, the mind, its fragility now so exposed, searches wildly for something to compare such a vision to and, in my case, only arrives at images created by Hollywood: The Towering Inferno. What seemed like hundreds of dramas played out inside my head like the snapshots of melodramas enacted by stars in blood too red to be real. The mind tries to fathom the actual people inside these buildings, the actual feelings of fear, pain, desperate hope, horror; and the ramifications of what is happening, for those inside, for their families, for we who witness it, for this city, for the world. No, god, no, is all I could think, could say, could cry. Oh my god, no. Small dark objects falling from the tower, too weighted, too resigned to be metal, were visible from where we stood. People dying one way instead of another. The second tower fell in what seemed like slow motion, sinking into its own cloud of dust; a kind of metal cascade, light and heavy at once, quiet. Too quiet for it to contain the loss it buried.

Our own paralysis as witnesses felt meaningless, frustrating. How did we let this happen? How can we walk away? How can we move? Why aren?t we all screaming and pulling our hair out and cursing the heavens and the hatred of humans? Steve had taken Kolter out of his stroller and was holding him, shielding him from me and my stricken face. I wanted to hold him tightly, to protect him and to let his not seeing comfort me. Steve nudged me to start walking, and we did, without thinking, walk east toward the apartment of friends of ours. Crossing Broadway we began to see a few dazed people walking northward as if in a trance, covered in gray ash and dust. We observed them silently, reverently, holding them apart from us, as they were in the altered state of those who had been there, had seen death more intimately than we had.

We spent the following afternoon and night with our friends, interrupting TV-watching with an occasional meal. Streets were blocked off, sirens whaled, more and more masked and ash-covered people, wordless, moved slowly northward.

For two more days we couldn?t leave the city, and we spent almost all of that time with friends, watching TV and eating and walking around with Kolter. A new cohesion had spread as fast as the news; people looked at each other knowingly, made eye contact, told their stories, seemed in touch with everyone?s needs to be dealt with caringly. The city became small and familiar.

Kolter was our only light during those days. His smile and laughter and needs always brought us out of our struggling minds and into each physical moment. The sun was bright across a blazing and clear-blue sky in every direction but south, which was hanging in dark soot. The greatness of the damage we had witnessed, this great wound to our city, to our hearts, seemed, as well, to give us back some essential intensity and appreciation for all we have, including the fact that it was shocking and new. For the many exposed to war on a regular basis, it might have seemed less so. We wanted to help and tried to donate blood but were turned away. Our greatest contribution turned out to be Kolter. Tired faces were transformed whenever he came upon the scene. He felt ever more like a gift.

Once back in New Jersey, for many weeks following I had trouble being alone. I?d run to the window every time I heard an airplane overhead. If I was alone for more than an hour I?d begin to imagine that I was in danger. Kolter and I spent nights at a friend?s house when my husband was away on business. It wasn?t until mid-December, after no further terrorist attacks had come to fruition, and after I wrote about Ground Zero for a travel guide, that I was able to let the panic submerge back into the depths beneath daily life.

Our war on terrorism didn?t reassure me; it only served to further alarm me, as I don?t believe that war is ever a decent solution. It bothered me that all I heard from our leaders was the call for greater patriotism, not what I felt was needed: a closer look at our responsibility to the world.

Now, six months later, when at airports guards with semi-automatic weapons, removing one?s shoes, and having all our luggage X-rayed has become routine, I still cannot agree with those whom I?ve heard say that these things make them feel safer. On the contrary, tighter security proves to me that we have let our world become less humane, less safe, more divisive. And though I would never say that terrorism is our own fault, I would venture to guess that we have our part in it. And I have begun to ask, What are we doing? Not so much to protect ourselves from the Evil Other but to understand each other more wholly? Isn?t calling them Evil a cheap way of making us seem more innocent than we are?

What would make me feel reassured? Less global poverty, more opportunity for the disenfranchised so that religious fanatics can?t gain a stronghold, real discussions by our politicians about how foreign policy can do the most good for the most people---policy that reflects greater equality, not special interests, not greed. For until we see the great global network less as an opportunity to get richer no matter what its costs to the developing world, there can be no freedom at home. What do I want for our son, when he is our age? For him to feel that the world is a safer, healthier, more abundant place for everyone, not just for him. In the meantime, I continue to regard him with the same sense of renewed wonder, awe, and urgency that began on September 11. Funny how death will sometimes give us the chance, if we take it, for an even greater love of life.