Five years on

Five years ago today was a day very much like today promises to be -- a bit warmer, perhaps, but a bright, late summer day. I was alone in the house because Mr. Brilliant, on a business trip to North Carolina, had been delayed overnight there because of severe thunderstorms. He called home right before I left for work to let me know that he'd arrived in LaGuardia and was on his way home.

A an hour later, all New York airports were closed.

I was supposed to go to an FDA validation class in D.C. that day. I had been dreading the trip, for no particular reason. I was supposed to go with two co-workers who were pretty tight, and I dreaded being the third wheel. But that didn't account for the DEGREE of dread I'd had for the trip, a dread I didn't understand.

Obviously, the trip never took place.

I was at work when I heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. "A small plane hit the World Trade Center", I was told, so I went back to work. Then the story became that it was a passenger plane, so I turned on the radio and went to the New York Times web site. After a while I lost my radio reception, and of course all the news site servers were overloaded, so we relied on reports from our network manager, who told us first when the first tower went down, then the second.

It seemed impossible. How could two 102-story towers just collapse? Needless to say, we were not going to D.C. that day.

I remember the Cuba Missile Crisis. I was in elementary school, so it didn't register, but I do remember the silly air raid drills where we would stand in the corridor with our arms over our heads to protect us from nuclear blast. But I never had the sense that the world was coming to an end that I had on September 11, 2001.

That afternoon, my workplace opened up the conference and turned on the TV, so people who wanted to see what was going on could watch.

As I've reported before, we were flipping channels that night and there was Larry Kudlow, grinning from ear to ear on CNBC and crowing happily that this meant and end to all talk about a Social Security lockbox. And I turned to Mr. Brilliant and said, "My God, they did it." I was referring to the Bush Administration.

The next day I received an e-mail from a friend. Her sister-in-law's brother was still missing. He was on a high floor of Tower One. I won't reprint his name because his family are fiercely private people, I don't know them personally, and they would not want to be identified in a public blog. When I got home the next day, I found out that a neighbor's husband was missing. He never came home either. She had just lost her son four months before in an automobile accident, and now this. A former co-worker of Mr. Brilliant's had a fiancé who was a New York City fireman. He was lost too.

For all that I smelled a rat right from day one, I felt the next day for the first time as if I wanted to fly a flag. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan. And then the story started getting holes in it, and I became one of the earliest believers, first in outright Administration complicity, and later in deliberate negligence. In some ways I liked it better when I was the only one who thought this way and everyone thought I was crazy. People don't think I'm crazy anymore.

Day after day, for the next few weeks, another photo would appear in the paper. At the same time as I read of more and more people in surrounding towns who had lost their lives, I felt almost guilty that I wasn't more directly affected. I didn't even go into New York until six months later. I never saw the flyers first-hand that were posted all over the place. This took place so close to where I live, and yet I was as far removed from it as if I had lived in Kansas. I felt as if I had no right to feel horror or grief or anything, when my own life was so comparatively untouched.

I think this is one reason I get so angry when I hear of people in the flyover states obsessing about 9/11 as a means of propping up their support for this president. I at least know that I have nothing to say about it. I didn't inhale the dust. I didn't see faces of my friends in the newspaper. Later on, when I read the complete list of casualties, I was relieved that NO ONE I had ever worked with was on the list. There's a certain amount of survivor's guilt in that, or at least a recognition that however much this event affected all of America, those of us lucky to have our husbands be on planes OTHER than those hijacked that day do NOT "own" 9/11 in the way New York residents and those loved ones of people who lost their lives do.

For much of my time working in New York City, I took the PATH train to the World Trade Center. I bought sport jackets for Mr. Brilliant at the Alexander's on the concourse. I have photographs that were developed at the Kelly Photo by the entrance to the E train. At one point I went to an interview for an Administrative Assistant position at Cantor Fitzgerald, but the guy was running late and I had to get to my then-current job. When they called to reschedule, I declined, because the elevators in the Trade Center freaked me out and I couldn't stand the thought of using them every day.

My most vivid memory of the World Trade Center was during game 6 of the 1986 NLCS. I was standing at the top of the escalators down to the PATH listening to the game on my Walkman radio. When the Mets tied the game in the 9th, a roar cascaded through the corridors of the building like nothing I'd ever heard before. I also remember Sharon, the homeless woman who lived in the Trade Center in those days. She always had a rabbit or a cat as a pet, and her pets were always better cared for than she was. One time I saw her sitting on a blanket with her back against the token booth by the E train, a cat in her lap eating from a can of Fancy Feast. I think I gave her ten dollars that day.

I hate that ABC/Disney is trying to make political hay out of the anniversary of this tragedy. I hate even that CBS is running the Naudet brothers' excellent documentary about that day. I hate it because all over the tri-state area, and elsewhere, there are over 2700 families who have to watch their loved ones die again and again every fucking year in perpetuity, while talking heads in the media say inane, faux-empathetic things, and the Republicans in Washington use these deaths as a bludgeon to beat the rest of us into submission.

I'll quote Steve Gillard to close this, because as a New Yorker, he is far better qualified than I to do so:

When people get upset that New Yorkers don’t share their experiences, and this is just a fraction of what I remember and the only reason I’m writing about it is that I don’t want to be asked about it. Here it is.

But I will say this: my starkest memories of 9/11 are the year of funerals. Day after day, some family buried someone and it made the papers.

I hate the tourists who come to rubberneck at the hole. I hate them and wish they would go away. When I went down there one time, I saw people selling pictures of the towers on fire.

You know, people fell from them on fire. Alive.

The people rebroadcasting their 9/11 broadcasts are no better than vermin. Matt Lauer should be placed on a glue trap in the sun.

This doesn’t belong to America. It isn’t some grand national cause. It is a tragedy some get to live with forever. You can remember the dead, but because you became scared of brown people or of someone blowing up your mall or of airplanes, you can share in it. You cannot and if you were smart, you wouldn’t want to. No one should want to carry the burdens of another because they feel they should.

Bush used 9/11 to prove himself a man and, as he had his entire life, failed miserably, killing thousands in the process. The dead of 9/11 deserved justice, not torture and a pointless, losing war in Iraq. Not Rudy Giuliani making money off the one good day in his miserable life. They have gotten so much less than they deserved, with ABC piling on top.

So I’ll do what I do every year at this time, avoid anything to do with this and hope it ends soon.