September on the Southern Tip

It's been over twenty years since hijackers flew two commercial jets into the World Trade Center in New York City. Times passes, but the political and philosophical ramifications are ever present.

There is a saying that’s often overused and goes something like “everyone remembers where they were when xyz happened”.

Perhaps overused, the line does speak to the impact that split second changes in the world can have on the human conscience.

As the month of September creeps along, many in the United States and around the world cannot help but reflect on the devastating terrorist attacks dating back to that month in 2001.

At the time I was nine years old but I still recall parts of the day clearly. I remember coming home from school and sitting at my kitchen counter talking about what had happened with my mother.

She was in a state of shock. Earlier in the day she had watched from home as the second plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. She had been on the phone with my father at the time, relaying events to him as they happened.

I remember bizarre parts of the day like the food I was eating – macaroni and tomatoes sprinkled with salt and pepper – a staple of my upbringing. I remember confusing the pentagon with the pyramids and now recall why I never ended up pursuing anything like a career in mathematics or geometry. I remember being huddled around the television set that night watching Larry King on CNN after President George W. Bush addressed the nation and the world.

Bordering on the age at which I would be able to solidify memories of the attacks was both a blessing and a curse. I made up for my age at the time of the attacks with periods of obsession over them in my adolescence. Even now, as an adult, I periodically revisit the original coverage from that morning. The coverage is still as jaw dropping as it was to watch live.

As I grew older, I found myself playing out alternate endings and trying to pry into the minds of those who had orchestrated the attacks.

News coverage at the time and even posthumous coverage years later leave out glaringly obvious points that I have always found interesting and horrifying.

One highlight reel and overview of the attacks runs the banner “The South Tower, WTC 2, was first to fall, despite not being hit until seventeen minutes after WTC 1.”

The reason for this is partly obvious in that Flight 175 careened into South Tower at a considerably lower level than Flight 11 had hit the North Tower. I probably pieced this together myself after taking an introductory high school physics class - a kiss and make up with science after my falling out with geometry.

In all seriousness, it made sense to me that the South Tower would fall first. The cumulative weight of the steel, and concrete, and people above the point of impact was greater in that building, and therefore so was the gravitational force bearing down on the broken and weakened parts of the building.

This eventually leads to one questioning the logic behind the attack plan itself. Often, I have reflected on the fact that if the goal was to kill as many civilians as possible, the hijackers should have delayed their flights by an hour ensuring the towers were at maximum occupancy. More than this, they could have flown two planes into a single building, trapping and killing scores more than were – perhaps tens of thousands, given that roughly 50,000 inhabited the complex during peak workday hours in addition to the nearly 200,000 daily visitors.

These are admittedly dark ideations. But they are important in that they speak to the partial illogic at play that morning. This was a demonstration, with symbolism being the main point, not head count.

There are other parts of that morning and the coverage that are, in a word, astonishing. The insistence on the part of newscasters to treat the second plane as some sort of mega coincidence was always annoying to me. Many broadcasts only flirted with the notion of a terrorist attack after reports of hijackings and after seeing tape of the attacks in Washington and Pennsylvania. That it took that degree of assuredness to shift the nature of the coverage is a breathtaking point. Try as those newscasters may have, wishing away reality was simply not on the menu in Manhattan that morning.

To be fair, the on-air coverage was a hectic maze of confusion for reporters and viewers. One television anchor covering the WTC watched live as the second plane sailed into the South Tower and to the amazement of anyone paying close attention, casually assumed he was watching replay tape of the original attack, despite both buildings billowing smoke, and paper, and people in front of his eyes. It was famed polemicist Christopher Hitchens who summed up 9/11 in New York City by suggesting that it was as if Charles Manson had become God for a day. Hitchens had a way with words.

Another writer, David Foster Wallace, who died by suicide in 2008, commented on the suicidal mind vividly and described the choice that many were met with on that sunny September morning in New York City:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

The 9/11 attacks marked a dramatic shift in the world. For many it served as a stark reminder that the world we live in is ultimately a function of how well we can cooperate with one another. The response to this inability to cooperate was profound, both domestically and internationally. The US government, and many individuals, drew battle lines in the sand. This initial response was only fueled by images of the burning buildings, of humans jumping from those burning buildings, and by video of smoke and crushed up concrete enveloping lower Manhattan like some sort of demonic blanket.

The attacks transformed the world for those now in their forties or fifties but so too they have impacted my generation. Years later, when developing my own playbook for how to navigate and view the world around me, I realized that 9/11 had left its corrosive marks on my soul. Perhaps more than anything, these attacks have allowed me the confidence to identify conflicts worth committing to and seeing through to the end. In that way, 9/11 has given me an ability to cozy up with reality as it presents itself, even if its ugly.

Insofar as I am trigger happy when it comes to wartime policies, the reality of lower Manhattan in September of 2001 has always provided me another gear to slip into when topics shift toward the supposed horrors of American imperialism. Few things are as disgusting to me as the moral scapegoating that tends to accompany such conversations. The implication that the American citizenry or the American government encouraged this sort of confrontation, or that they own part of the blame for it is a disgusting sentiment I am incapable of signing onto.

The sun spilled out generously over New York City on 9/11. Aviation experts and pilots are said to refer to such cloudless conditions as ‘severe clear’. Despite the conditions, for me, and I suspect many others, 9/11 and the human horror it was delivered with serve as a reminder that the world is simply not all sunshine and rainbows. More clear than the visibility that morning was the realization that if we are to be free, truly free, and if we are to defend that ideal in our own societies, we must be conscious of the fact that many in the world do not share our enthusiasm and, worse, wish to directly oppose it.

Twenty-one years on and I find myself drastically changed from the nine-year-old watching CNN that day. Perhaps related to my work in psychiatry, I now reflexively think about all the trauma and human fallout.

I think about the countless cases of regular people walking through the streets being met with bodies and body parts. I think about the regret on the part of the friendly airport agent who allowed two passengers, late for their plane, to board – only to be met with the information that they were hijackers later that day.

I think about the hysterical interviews streamed across telecasts for weeks and what life would be like for those people moving forward; the harrowing phone calls from passengers and those trapped above the zones of impact; the helicopter pilots attempting to land on the roof of the WTC only to find no one there to save - all of it was somehow incomprehensible.

And the strategies – oh, the strategies. The strategies that unfolded in the South Tower after the impact at the North Tower – some office workers yielding and obeying advice that suggested it might be safer to stay put. Worse still, those in the North Tower after the impact of Flight 11, similarly staying in their offices as to not crowd the stairwells for incoming emergency services. The fact that those on the ground and in the buildings had failed to consider the towers could collapse is a profound thought to be left with.

Despite all the gore and horror of that morning, there are bright lines we should remember. The courage shown by firefighters and police officers who reported to their precincts even while off duty was remarkable. New Yorkers helping their fallen citizens on the streets as chaos unfolded is spectacular given that it would have been one hell of a lot easier to get out of dodge. An evening news anchor reminded us of our nature by recounting how, while attempting to donate blood earlier that day, she was met with a five hour long line. My own country sheltering stray planes and passengers for days and weeks on end was the best of humanity placed on display and showed that what happened to America was not isolated there.

And yes, a President - a man often chastised and ridiculed for his linguistic and cognitive skills, but nonetheless a man who took the moment by the throat in perhaps the greatest spontaneous political speech and rallying cry the world has ever witnessed.

Yelled into a bullhorn from atop a demolished fire truck in response to “George, we can’t hear you.” – “I can hear you. I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

Whatever you think of Bush, or American bravado, or even imperialism if you see it that way, the video is an incredible piece of history.

Beyond the carnage those 19 terrorists and their organizers brought to America on 9/11, it is hard not to be heartened by the courage and selflessness and community shown off in the aftermath of the attacks.

The free people freely walking or freely biking to work meshed with a backdrop of evil is an imagery that is in some ways fitting. In some ways it captures the entire story best and reminds us that while western power may not be perfect, the ideals it attempts to grab and cling to are worth defending because it need not be this way. The way of life we have adopted in the west is one never guaranteed and one in need of defense, however imperfect it may seem in times of internal struggle.

That is a sobering thought and perhaps one worth contemplating more often than once a year, despite how important and necessary of a duty that is and will remain.