Weekend Assignment: Remembering September 11th

Weekend Assignment #128:(ed: this link no longer goes anywhere) Share your thoughts about 9/11. You can remember back on what you were doing on the day or give some thought to how we think about it today. Thoughts personal, political or philosophical are all up for consideration. Tell us all what you think about when you think about September 11, 2001.

A year ago I wrote this about 9/11 (numbers shown current as of September 11, 2005)

Total death toll in World Trade Center disaster-2752
Total American Death toll in Iraq War to date-1896 (if you add other coalition troops, that number reaches 2093)
Estimated Iraqi death toll-somewhere between 24,680 and 27,930
Amount of credible evidence that Iraq had anything at all to do with the September 11th terrorist attacks-

...

...

::sigh::

Almost exactly one year later, these are the headlines: No al-Qaeda tie.

Globe and Mail - Saddam Hussein regarded al-Qaeda as a threat rather than a possible ally, a U.S. Senate report says, contradicting assertions President George W. Bush used to build support for the war in Iraq that he launched to counter a threat of weapons of mass destruction that were never found.

The report discloses for the first time an October, 2005, CIA assessment that before the war, Mr. Hussein's government "did not have a relationship" with al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

When the United States first went to war in Iraq, there was much disillusionment and anger on the part of the American Government and people that Canada declined to join them in that endeavour. Our government's position has always been that the war in Iraq was never connected to the "war on terror." Five years later, I am as proud now as I was then to be a Canadian whose government is not participating in what has clearly been shown to be nothing more that a personal vendetta of George W. Bush.

But that's all completely off topic. The weekend assignment was to recount our personal reminiscences of what we were doing on the day of the terrorist attacks against the people of the United States of America.


I was driving to work that morning when the radio announcers made some comment about a plane flying into the World Trade Center in New York. They had heard early unconfirmed reports of the incident, with no details available. I don't think they believed it had really happened, or perhaps thought it was some kind of light plane, and were making jokes about it; pilot of the plane deserves a Darwin award kind of thing. Then they went to a commercial.
As I was pulling into the parking lot at work, they came back from commercial in a much more sombre mood. Apologising for making light of the situation earlier, they indicated that it seemed to be much more serious, and suggested that anyone who was listening might want to get to a TV.
I sprinted into the store.

At the time I was working at an independent home electronics retail store selling upper end home theater systems, so I was surrounded by televisions all day long. I flipped on the double row of breakers in the back room to fire up the store, ran straight to the big-screen SONY in the front window, and turned it to CNN.It was less than ten minutes later that I saw, live, as it happened, the second plane fly into the second tower of the World Trade Center. I remember thinking that Hollywood special effects of planes and buildings blowing up were amazingly realistic after now having seen the real thing. I remember thinking that was a bizarre, and probably unsympathetic thing to be thinking. I remember having a tough time putting together solid, coherent thoughts for a while.
I thought back to the morning, fifteen years earlier, that I had stumbled groggily out of my bedroom and turned on the TV just in time to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger explode seventy-three seconds into its tenth lift off. Except that was an accident, and this, clearly, was not.

It was like the day the Earth stood still. For some reason I was alone that morning. The co-worker I usually shared the shop with on Tuesday mornings was late, or off, I don't seem to remember. [Edit: He just replied to the e-mail I sent him yesterday. Apparently, he was there that morning, but I have no memory of him. I was in a bubble.] The boss wasn't in either. I assume he had flipped on the TV before he left the house, and got caught watching there.
I pulled a chair out from the lunch table in the back room, and plopped it in the middle of the showroom floor, in front of the big TV. I stretched a phone cord as far as it would go, and put the phone out where I could answer it without running behind the counter. The phone didn't ring. No customers came into the store. There were no deliveries. For long stretches of time, there was no one else in the world but me and a fifty inch view of CNN. The world had suddenly become an unfamiliar place.

From time to time an employee from one of the other stores in the plaza would pop in during their break. They knew where to go to find a TV. For ten minutes we would silently share each other's company, and then they would go back to their jobs. As the door closed behind them it became as if they hadn't really existed; as if I had imagined them, like I was imagining the horrible things I was seeing on the television screen.
As the morning wore on, we started to see new footage, as it trickled into the news services from camera men in the field. Among the most dramatic was the shot of the first plane roaring overhead and smashing into the North Tower, caught by a cameraman filming a documentary about firefighters.
It seemed like hours of watching replays of the second plane slamming into the South Tower, and long range shots of people at windows begging for help, and , once or twice, those people giving up and leaping to their deaths rather than face the nightmare of smoke and fire behind them. In reality it was only about fifty-eight minutes before the steel reinforcing beams between the seventy-seventh and eight-fifth floors of the South Tower, weakened by the intense heat, gave out,and the entire building fell straight down, burying itself in its own basements. Twenty-nine minutes later, the North Tower suffered the same fate, and the world, which was already stranger than it had been when I got out of bed, became virtually unrecognisable. Like the new New York City skyline.

That skyline today, irrevocably altered by the events of less than two hours five years ago, is a metaphor for this new world we live in. You see it, and at first glance it looks the same, but something, something you almost cannot put your finger on, is missing. I look at that skyline, and there is a hole in it. I know there should be those two, iconic towers thrusting skyward, but I can't see where they are supposed to go.
There's a hole in the world, and the air is leaking out. I'm watching the news around the world, and it's hard to breathe sometimes. Can a new World Trade Center on the site plug the hole, and fix the world. Somehow I doubt it.

tags: Memes, Weekend Assignment, September 11