9/11

I want to write about September 11th 2001 for a journal entry because of all the days of my life thus far I am sure that this was the most emotional I have experienced. The feeling of collective grief with fellow Americans, and fellow human beings, was surreal and very moving. Also, two and a half years later, it is remarkable how so much has changed, and how what once was a feeling of unity, has now become one of partisanship, politics and polarization.
I had just taken some time off from work and had spent four days at Nags Head by myself, drinking beer and sight seeing around the Outer Banks. That weekend I visited my parents in Charlottesville where all three of my sisters were visiting. It was the first time we had all been together in years. It was a loud, boisterous weekend and by the end of it I was pretty worn out. I retuned to Winston-Salem and had a message on my box from my boss who told me to take one more day before I came back to work. How great! I remember that the big news of the day was the Gary Conduit scandal.
I woke that Tuesday to the sound of the phone ringing. My girlfriend Margaret picked it up. It was her business partner, Alex(an old friend of mine), and he said something like, “Is this it? Turn on the TV.”
The first image we saw was the Pentagon burning .We couldn’t tell from the report what had happened because they were talking about the effort to get people out or something, but we did see on the ticker at the bottom of the screen that a plane had hit the Pentagon. We were riveted. This was big news.
Then the image of the World Trade Center came up. Everything about what we had just seen in Washington changed. This wasn’t a news story anymore. By this time, both towers had been hit, and images of the streets of New York were being dispersed with ones of the bigger picture. One of the symbols of modern Western Civilization was in flames, poised to collapse. Tough New Yorkers were weeping and scrambling to get uptown. We watched, as both towers collapsed.
Then to a field in Pennsylvania. Another plane had crashed and we heard the words terrorism and the name Osama bin Laden. The idea of all of these innocent victims perishing roughly at the same time began to hit us. To be watching it in real time was surreal beyond words and, we stayed glued to the television for the rest of the day.
About a year later I met a young woman who had been in the Pentagon when the plane hit it. She said that even though the Pentagon is the biggest office building in the world, you could still feel the repercussions of the crash on the other side of the building so much so that she thought a bomb had gone off in her section. She said that she felt that this was it, it was over. She was evacuated out of the Pentagon eventually, and said that she had problems dealing with what had happened for some time after that. I can only imagine. She offered me this information willingly, but after talking to her a while I felt a need to change the subject, she seemed to be revisiting a place she was reluctant to go back to.
The most disturbing images for me were of the people jumping from the upper stories of the World Trade Center. The thought of those images still gives me chills. The desperation, the feeling that all hope is lost, that these people must have felt to compel them to plunge to a certain death still fills me with grief.
For some months after the tragedy I looked at George W. Bush as a hero. I no longer feel this way because as the dust settled from the wreckage of the WTC, Bush systematically turned a sympathetic outpouring from the civilized world into a feeling of suspicion and alienation. And now the Quagmire of Iraq…