nmah6567.xml

nmah6567.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2004-08-01

My day began with an early morning taxi to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). My destination was Denver. It took me a year to get there. Our flight was the last one cleared for take off that day. At something like twenty minutes in the air the captain announced over the public address system that the FAA had closed the U.S. air space and we were landing at the Las Vegas McCarran Airport. I learned from the person sitting near me (or possibly the captain) that a World Trade Center tower in New York City had been once again the target of a bomb.

After disembarking, telephoning relatives in Denver and Los Angeles, and listening to the radio of a news/candy seller, I made my way to a lounge where a television showed the billowing smoke, then the second plane attacking another World Trade Center tower, and its total collapse. People kept moving forward toward the set as seats vacated until those remaining learned that we all had to leave: the airport was being closed. I exited toward the main terminal building, passed armed officers marching to secure the McCarran Airport, and reached a scene of some order and much chaos: large crowds, long lines, and rental car counters with signs that said "no cars are available."

While waiting for a public telephone I had the good fortune to hear a limosine driver asking if someone wanted to fill out the passenger quota for his Lincoln Continental which was to leave for LAX as soon as it was completed. I knew that train and bus service was not available, decided quickly that money was not important, and joined what became a four hour ride covering over three hundred mile, having paid with a credit card. The driver took the three other passengers to Orange County and Long Beach destinations before dropping me at my home five miles north of LAX.

Usually when I reach home after a trip I unpack. This time I dropped the luggage just inside the front door, headed straight for the television, and sat down. I was limp. It was only hours since my early morning taxi had called for me. All I could do was stare as images came across the screen. My life had been centered on New York for its first twenty years. Indeed only four years earlier I'd stood on a rooftop at a cocktail party of my college. Another alumnus took my picture. The two World Trade Center towers are clearly visible in the photograph. Their site is a scant mile away from the college building we stood upon, and I'd recently walked that distance the day of the photograph. I couldn't move: it was an effort to sit and watch my birth city replace Pearl Harbor as the site of America's greatest one day loss of life.

I live five miles from the most prominent terrorist target on the West Coast, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). As a child I experienced World War II. At age eight I read about the A-bomb, looked a maps in the newspaper, and knew that one such weapon detonated over lower Manhattan would kill everyone from there up until where I lived in the northern Bronx. Now I'm aware day by day that our ports are vulnerable, and that the Cole and World Trade Center towers could be just preliminaries to attacks on Los Angeles or other major U.S. cities.

I look at people, trees, flowers: I don't think I did before September 11th. I choose to be relaxed, focussed on things that matter to more people or just to myself.

The diversity of those who worked in the World Trade Center towers. The way pain came to so many. The message delivered so cruelly, that this killing is not different from what we support through embargos, corrupt regimes, and inaction - penury instead of generosity being the main characteristic of this, the wealthiest of the world's nations, when it comes to assisting the poorest countries.

I didn't fly an American flag myself, but my wife did, and she gave flag pins to others.

We can identify the flag with the firemen, police, and other rescue workers. But it is true that the international community suffered greviously September 11th. We should be pulling together with other people and governments all over the world.

The flag symbolizes our people and this country. But working as a single nation is not the answer to terrorism. We don't have a monopoly on truth, just as we didn't lose only U.S. citizens on September 11th.