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The view from a quarter century later...
It's 8 o'clock on a Tuesday and I am just starting my shift. Ordinarily the TVs on display for sale would be playing a demo-loop fed from a DvD-player behind the counter but this morning they're tuned to CBS. A small crowd has gathered to watch as Tower 1 burns. I'm supposed to be answering questions, and trying to upsell people on the company's membership discount program and extended warranty plans but my heart's not in it. I watch the second plane hit live. I remember the collective gasp, and the horrified silence that followed. Then like Colonel Kurtz's diamond bullet it strikes me. This is no mistake. This is a deliberate act. An act of courage, an act of perfect crystalline Will.
100s of people dead in an instant because somebody made a choice. By the end of the day that count would be in the thousands. I would later find out that a friend of mine had lost an entire branch of their family tree in that fireball. An Aunt, an Uncle, two young cousins, and a dog all reduced to ash in the impact of United Flight 175 with Tower 2's southern face.
As the morning progresses there are rumors of other hijackings. Over a dozen planes are unaccounted for or not responding to ATC. There is rampant speculation about what target will be hit next. The President is in the air, and National Guard jets are being scrambled. The rest of my shift passes in a blur, but certain images remain seared into my brain.
Under my initial reaction of rage and helplessness something simultaneously imperceptible and momentous has shifted. It's cliche to say that 9/11 was the death of innocence for a generation but there is a truth to it. Things that had been mere abstract concepts to me when I woke up that morning, "Free Will", "Horror", "Heroism", "Good", "Evil", "Civilization", and "Civilization's Enemies", were suddenly real, immediate, and vital to me in a way that they hadn't been 24 hours previously. I can look back on my life today and say with confidence that, philosophically, the Charlie that woke up on the morning of September 12th 2001, was a fundamentally different person from the one who had gone to bed on September 10th.
In the interests of full disclosure I am tempted to turn this post into a rant about how politics and war are downstream of culture, and to wax philosophical about 9/11 as an act of theater, but I also feel like doing so would cheapen the moment, and be disrespectful to those who died 25 years ago today.
So instead I will ask, where were you on the day they wounded New York?
I was an undergrad at UW Madison. I had an ATI All-In-Wonder card in my PC and a scheduled task to wake up the PC and turn on CNN every morning as my alarm clock. That morning, the news was about a plane having crashed into the WTC. I had heard about the plane crashing into the Empire State Building and figured this was a similar story. I went to breakfast in the student commons where CNN was also on TV, and as I ate my toast and eggs I watched the second plane come in. I instantly lost all appetite and went back to my dorm room, glued to CNN while I called a couple of people on the dorm landline and talked a bit. I didn't like the feelings of rage that were bubbling up, so I had a couple of shots of bourbon and headed off to my first class. I can't recall at all what took place in the classroom. IIRC the rest of the classes that day were cancelled via electronic mail shortly afterwards.
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