It’s hard to believe it has been ten years since those towers fell. The memories are so vivid in my mind, walking down the stairs on that fateful Tuesday morning to get breakfast. I passed into the living room and walked past the television, a 60-inch behemoth that shows everything in what seems to be motion picture size.
As I walked into the kitchen, my wife told me an airplane hit the World Trade Center. I glanced at the television and even on that big screen, it didn’t look that bad. The screen displayed a closeup of the hole, and I thought a small private plane hit the tower and loss of life would be maybe three people.
But I have never been to New York City. I never got to visit the World Trade Center, so I had no sense of scale. I don’t know how far apart those ribs between the windows were.
As I looked later, after the camera had panned out, I saw that the hole went clear across the width of the building. It was then that I knew Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden were responsible for this.
I saw on the television people jumping from the upper floors of the building, I suppose wanting to decide for themselves when they would die.
I watched in horror as the second plane hit the south tower. The plane hit lower than the first one on the other building. I knew right then that the towers would collapse, and I knew the south tower would go first.
When I was right about the south tower, I hoped that the north tower would survive below the crash, but it came down, too.
Meanwhile, reports seemed to keep coming in, form the Pentagon, from rural Pennsylvania. I wondered when it would all end. The anthrax scares a few days later continued that thought. When would it all end?
And now, ten years later, I am still moved by the sights and sounds. But I was not there. I was not covered in dust. I did not evacuate my city. I did not see my familiar landscape forever changed.
It seems to me that people who live in New York, who experienced it, have no concept of how this affected the rest of the nation, just as we have no concept of what it must have been like to be so close to it.
But the attack on the World Trade Center was not an attack against stock brokers, and it was not an attack against New York. It was an attack on figureheads that represent the United States.
The terrorists chose NewYork because unlike Las Vegas, what happens in New York makes the world news. New York is visible, and the World Trade Center was the most visible part of New York.
It wasn’t an attack on those few who lived in the shadow of those buildings. This was an attack on me, on my family, on my neighborhood, on my city and state, and on my homeland.
And New York, recognize this. My small neighborhood in Scottsdale, Arizona is much closer to this fateful day than the 2000 miles would suggest. Two of these 19 terrorists trained at the Scottsdale Airpark, located roughly one mile from my home as the crow flies.
After September 11, the FBI wanted information on any middle eastern men living in unfurnished homes. It took me a couple of days to realize that in October of 1999, my kids trick-or-treated at an unfurnished house down the block from my home. They were greeted at the door by a smiling middle eastern man who gave them candy. The house was bare, completely unfurnished everywhere we could see from the door.
We trick-or-treated at that same house in 2000 and were greeted by the same middle eastern man, and the house remained unfurnished.
After hijackers crashed four jetliners and brought down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI determined that at least two conspirators had lived and trained in Arizona, a state that was a historic nexus for key al-Qaida figures.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/05/03/20110503bin-laden-arizona-terrorists.html#ixzz1Xf0dCGmw
In October 2001, the house had new occupants.
All the evidence is pretty convincing that the two men mentioned in this article lived on my street, and participated in the destruction that happened a decade ago.
But I don’t want to remember those events. They are a painful day in my country’s history. I never expected NATO treaties to be envoked by an attack in the United States. I never wanted to see how an idea I had for fiction, namely flying jets into skyscrapers, would actually play out. It was supposed to stay fiction.
I want to remember the people who lost their lives just because they went to work. I want to remember the New York police and firefighters who went in and up when they should have been going down and out. I want a promise that these people did not die for nothing.
But I don’t want to remember, for remembering is reliving. It means reliving the destruction of symbols of America’s greatness. It means remembering that my own children ate candy given to them by a mass-murdering terrorist. it means thinking about how liberty has eroded in the name of safety.
In that last manner, Osama bin Laden won. He changed America. We let him change America, and nowhere is that more evident than at the airport.
It’s a reminder that the America of the 20th-century is a thing of the past.
