Six years ago today, I witnessed the collapse of the second Tower of the World Trade Center from the corner of Canal St. and West Broadway. I woke up that morning, having crashed on a friend’s couch after making flyers for a DJ show (I was a full time DJ at the time), to the blaring sound of an unusual amount of emergency vehicle sirens. I looked out the window to see what was going on, and it looked like a scene out of King Kong, with panicked peoplerunning down Grand St., citizens crying, one woman vomiting on the street, others frantically dialing numbers on their cell phones.
Before I had time to ask what was going on, my friend Alex-at the time a NY law school student and one of the most low key, calm, un-excitable people I know-suddenly barged into the apartment, choked up, holding back tears and pointing at the TV and telling us to turn on the TV immediately. He was nearly hyperventilating. I asked him what had happened.
“A Jet aircraft just flew into the World Trade Center”.
“Huh!? A jet plane? It wasn’t just a small private plane?”
“No, it was BIG! Turn on the TV…”.. He couldn’t talk. I’d never seen him like that.
For some reason, maybe because the full picture of the event hadn’t unfolded yet, I didn’t go outside immediately see what was going on. Instead I was just glued to NY One , waiting to get information about the crash into the first tower and what that the commotion was all about. After the second plane hit though, it was obvious what was going on wasn’t an accident, and I felt I had to see the rest of it first hand.
The thing that sticks out in my mind the most about that day was watching the tremendous numbers of Emergency vehicles roll in as they made their way down West Broadway towards the towers as the blaze and smoke grew more intense. They were from all over: Fort Lee NJ, Bensonhurst, Queens, every part of the city was represented. While police and firefighters rolled slowly towards the WTC, people on the street were giving reports about other incidents around the country by word-of-mouth, some true, some not. Some reported that the Sears Tower had been hit. Word of the pentagon attack made its way through the crowd, more planes crashed in Pennsylvania. Nobody knew what to believe. Everyone was anxious, trying to sift out what was true, shifting anxiously between conversations about events around the country, their attention then magnetically drawn back to the steadily increasing fire and smoke beginning to engulf the building.
After the collapse of the second tower—I was close enough to see all kinds of things I didn’t want to, but luckily far enough away that there was no immediate threat to my safety—people that had gathered slowly began to disperse. A giant cloud of yellowish smoke and haze engulfed lower Manhattan, making it hard to see anything. The beauty of the day was mocking, it just had the feeling of a horrible, surreal dream. After a bit, some who had escaped the collapse of the tower started to filter North towards where we were standing, covered in thick layers of white pasty residue from the building collapse. One man, a middle aged business man, was being interviewed by the Post and in typical NY gallows-humor-tough-guy fashion claimed he was gonna ask for some money for his account in a jocular fashion, and then broke down into tears as he was helped off by some law enforcement officers.
After the collapse of the towers, I wandered around lower Manhattan, stunned, at that point barely unable to process what I had seen that day. What do you do after witnessing an epic, macabre, high tech-death spectacle that will be remembered as long as human history is recorded? Subway service was cut off until later in the afternoon, when I was able to grab an F train heading Eastbound to Brooklyn. Prior to that, like a lot of others, I walked for a while, occasionally popping into a store or restaurant to check a TV for any new updates. Lots of stores had brought out TV’s onto the streets, and crowds would form around them and then disperse. My late 20’s hipster instincts eventually led me instinctively North and East to the Lower East Side, and in my semi-trance like state I ended up on Avenue A and 14th, where artists were already at work painting a graffiti mural to honor the Towers and the victims, candlelight vigils already in place at their feet.
One of the things that made me the proudest to live in New York that day was the spirit of volunteerism—obviously in the fire and police dept. where people risked and gave their own lives—but also in ordinary citizens’ reactions to the event. A friend and I went to give blood at the Beth Israel Medical Center, but so many people had rushed to give blood that they weren’t taking any more volunteers-in fact, hospital officials were instructing people to call others to notify them not to come down because there were too many donors. One of the hospital employees broke it down harrowingly: “There aren’t many people that need blood. You either made it out or you didn’t, and there just aren’t that many wounded people”.
That same night, still trying to sort out just what in God’s name I had seen, I had my weekly DJ show in Frank’s Lounge in Brooklyn , my home away from home in the city. That night, people danced their sorrows away, tried to laugh and celebrate life when it had been revealed as fragile, and it was maybe the most energetic night that we had.
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In the days immediately following the attacks, most of my DJ gigs were shut down (they were mostly in lower Manhattan). Given what I had just witnessed, I didn’t much feel like going to play music for entertainment purposes anyways. It felt wrong, and I didn’t want to watch the TV broadcast and re-broadcast of the horrific footage of the planes striking the towers—it made me queasy–so I spent most of my time in my Clinton Hill apartment pacing and listening to the radio as new information rolled in. I couldn’t sleep for days after the event, as in my mind I couldn’t stop reliving the sounds and sights of the afternoon, imagining the horror of what it must have been like inside Windows on the World, or the inconsolable grief of those who had lost loved ones unexpectedly. The reality of the event and the possible consequences of the reaction to it started slowly settling in.
The next week or two was a blur of sorrow and confusion, walking around the city and seeing all the posters that families had put up searching for their loved ones. The acrid smell of the building still permeated the sky all the way down into the subway system, even from the outer boroughs. Everywhere in the city flyers on kiosks looking for lost loved ones, heartbreaking.
But if there was a silver lining to the cloud, it was for the first time since I had moved to New York in 1998 that I had ever felt a genuine feeling of empathy or compassion among strangers there. People seemed less money driven and greedy, more willing to listen, more caring, less cold. Strangers of all walks of life would talk to each other, tell stories, hug each other, and retell their experiences, united by grief in the wake of tragedy, until a certain point when they didn’t feel like talking about it anymore and the best thing you could do was just try to fake it and get back into the swing of things. NY in the week after the attacks was as humane as I had ever witnessed it. People were angry, sad, grieving, but there were very few calls for revenge or retribution, mostly a city trying to comfort those who had been through tragedy. Mayor Hero, Rudy Giuliani, announced that the death toll would be ‘more than most of us can bear’, and a city tried to figure out how to recover. One thing was clear, at least from my experience-the clamor for revenge and blood and retribution was coming a lot louder from those outside the city than those that had actually witnessed it.
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“This is a difficult vote. This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make. Any vote that may lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction.” -Hillary Clinton, October 10th, 2002
More difficult than the memories of the attacks themselves was the way Bush, an empowered group of ideologues who had never seen war, and those blinded by their desire for blood, profits, or both spit in the face of the civilians and rescue workers who had perished in the 9/11 attacks-by twisting their personal tragedies on 9/11 into a rationale for justifying the impending multi-trillion dollar murderous debacle in Iraq in the name of patriotism. Equally infuriating was the numbing inability or recalcitrance of mainstream media and government officials in opposition to the war to do anything to stop it, and the unwillingness of elected leaders I had previously respected to stand up for what was true or right by speaking out against the war when courage to do so was most needed.
Prior to the unleashing of the “Shock and Awe” bombing raid as part of operation “Iraqi Freedom” http://www.shockandawe.com/, I participated in two major protests against the war. The first was in Washington D.C. and the second in New York City in late August on the doorstep of the Republican National Convention . Both marches were organized and coordinated at least in part by International A.N.S.W.E.R. Despite the hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors, even at first glance upon arriving at the demonstrations you could feel they weren’t going to stop anything. The protests utter inability to maintain focus on the singular goal of trying to stop the war as consternating as the right’s bloodthirsty contempt for reason, diplomacy, or constitutionality.
At certain points I wondered if this group of protestors would be able stop a condominium development project, much less a feckless and belligerent Bush white house.
Appeals to end the war ended up getting distorted or drowned out by the noise of the litany of Patti Smith performances, leftist platitudes, self indulgent calls for revolution and legalized marijuana, adolescent fantasies of overthrowing capitalism, and 100 other causes, none as urgent as the one at hand. The god damned building was on fire, and it wasn’t time for Chomskyist discourse about ending global imperialist hegemony. We didn’t need another t-shirt with Che Guevara on it.
A.N.S.W.E.R.’s organizers seemed vain, out of touch, and politically unskilled; young, wanna be-rock stars with little political savvy better suited to lead a progressive club at a university than to serve as the last line of defense against the well-oiled, money hungry and bloodthirsty Bush war crusade. Where were the power players on the left that needed to speak out about it? Where was Schumer? Where was Hillary? Where were the centrists and the so-called ‘fiscal conservatives’ to bring a sense of perspective to things? The left’s voice was important but it needed to include the center as well if it wanted to be taken seriously.
With protestors able to garner little more than a 10 second news segment from cowed networks, other major news outlets or sources of opposition marginalized and unafraid to be depicted as unpatriotic, and the war seeming more and more inevitable, the last hope that reason would prevail at some point fell upon the 107th congress and the senators I helped put into office: Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. But both, along with the majority of U.S. senators, unsurprisingly caved
I’m not a political analyst nor do I pretend to be or aspire to be one. But If I, a 28 year-old DJ about as far outside of the loop in Washington as possible, I could smell that the whole WMD story was a cooked farce, surely two of the most powerful and connected Washington insiders had to have known it. Hillary’s now infamous quote that the war probably the “hardest decision she had to make” made me wretch. Looking back, you know the decision wasn’t hard because she was afraid of being wrong about the evidence of WMD’s. It was hard because she had to decide between endorsing the blatant lies being used as a rationale for an unjust war, or risking her own political ambitions by standing up and doing what was right.
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Rudolph Giuliani, Republican National Convention, August 30th, 2004
As someone who more often than not falls on the liberal side of the fence, prior to 9/11 I didn’t exactly have a glowing opinion of then mayor Giuliani. Watching his act on that day, or at least the media’s glowing portrayal of it, caused me to temporarily re-consider my beliefs about him, or at the very least, caused me to be a bit more sympathetic to a mayor I had considered cruel, mean-spirited, and full of hot air previously. People naturally want to trust their elected leaders in a time of crisis, and Giuliani conveyed a sense of leadership it was needed. I was at least willing to listen at that point, maybe for the first time, to a Republican leader that I previously had associated with his reputation for brutality, racism, and cronyism.
That was short lived. Slowly but surely after the 9/11 attacks, as the pieces fell into place, it became apparent that not even the deaths of some of his closest friends on that day were enough to stop Rudy from permanently cementing his place in the scumbag hall of fame by invoking the memories of the fallen on 9/11 to shill for Bush and do some preening of his own for his 2008 presidential campaign. Giuliani took advantage of the $154 million dollar orgy in Madison Square Garden to milk his starring role in 9/11 for all it was worth, in the meanwhile proclaiming that the Republican party had “removed the Taliban”, making disingenuous (read: absurd) comparisons between the terror groups that had attacked the WTC and Hitler’s march through Europe, and linking opposition to the war as ‘appeasement and compromise’. Just in case you didn’t get the point by then, he re-iterated the baseline message: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
Watching Giuliani at the RNC whoring himself out to Republican out of town guests driving rented SUV’s and renting polo shirts, mindlessly waving flip flops in the air, mindlessly caught up in the hysteria of their own delusions, was too much. Those cowards were the furthest from the 9/11 attacks and the first to cry war. I had to run out of the Upper East Side coffee shop I was sitting in watching the broadcast of the RNC before I threw something at the television. I wonder if Giuliani, the great New Yorker, still thanks God George Bush is president now that the homeland security dept. continues to receive grades of C-F on its annual report card, including an F grade for preparedness and response. But then again, the great New Yorker Giuliani did spend more time flying to and attending Yankees games in the months after 9/11 than he did working at ground zero despite calling himself “one of the 9/11 cleanup workers” and boasting falsely that he was “at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers.” Since then, mayor hero has increasingly come under attack from firefighters and first responders in NYC, some of whom blame the mayor for communications problems at ground zero , while others resent him for grandstanding and milking 9/11 while concealing evidence of health problems now affecting 9/11 rescue workers. Referring to Giuliani’s exaggerated claims of volunteerism:
“I found his comment to be disgracefully insulting,” said Battalion Chief John J. McDonnell, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association in New York, in a New York Times interview. “I personally saw him on the 11th, and I can’t tell the next time I saw him” at the site after the attacks.
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Six years later, September 11,2007, I am living in Tainan, Taiwan, teaching for a University and doing some part time scouting in baseball. Things in my life have gone in new, interesting, unexpected directions. Despite the elapsed time, however, I still recall what I witnessed on 9/11 nearly every day of my life, I can still remember the sick crackling sound of the buildings as they collapsed, the omnipresent smell afterwards of death, plastic, and burning wires, the sinister glowing of the fluorescent search lights from north of ground zero as rescue crews pored through the WTC wreckage looking for bodies or survivors. I think about the nights that I spent in my apartment pacing back and forth listening to the radio for updates after the attack, trying to sort things out. But I also remember the goodwill in the aftermath of the attacks-both from headlines in the foreign press and the genuine empathy I experienced in New York City first hand-until it was squandered by the criminal and incompetent in the Bush administration and those like Rudy willing to pander to them.
As an expatriate living abroad, both statistically and through my own experiences, I can verify that the with us or against us attitudes and botched foreign policy by the Bush Administration, Giuliani, and the armchair quarterbacks clamoring for war from their suburban living rooms, have damaged, perhaps irreparably, America’s reputation abroad.
Statistically, According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project Summary of Findings, “
“A 47-nation survey finds global public opinion increasingly wary of the world’s dominant nations and disapproving of their leaders. Anti-Americanism is extensive, as it has been for the past five years. … Global distrust of American leadership is reflected in increasing disapproval of the cornerstones of U.S. foreign policy… further more the United States is the nation blamed most often for hurting the world’s environment, at a time of rising global concern about environmental issues.”
From my first hand experience, I have found that people I’ve talked to in foreign countries- ranging from small business owners to academics to folks working in tea shops- simply don’t give the U.S. the benefit of the doubt anymore, at least from the candid assessments I get from people I’ve talked to in Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, Japan, also here in Taiwan. In 2000 and 2001, I traveled throughout Asia, making stops in Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. During my stay in those countries the first time around, even in Hanoi, people would be curious and excited when they learned I was American, they’d try to shake my hand, talk to me, and would ask me curiously about what America was like. Some students in a temple in Japan even asked for my autograph simply because I was American. People used to ask me about Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton, the NBA, was New York really the way it looked on television. People had their reservations but seemed to be willing to overlook them.
From my impression now, things have really changed. Bush dead enders and head-in-the-sand conservatives- who will probably read this article and dismiss it as blind bed wetting liberalism–have no idea how far I have to go to defend America in conversations I have….with strangers who pick fights with me. Many of my British expatriate colleagues, educated, reasonable people, are convinced that 9/11 must have been an inside job. Simply trying to convince them that the Bush administration was merely blinded by ideology and incompetent rather than deliberately behind the attacks themselves is no easy task. One hotel owner in Malaysia I talked to-he had lived and gone to school in Boston-expressed surprise when he talked to me and learned I wasn’t an arrogant nut-job blinded by nationalism and could have a respectful discussion about 9/11 with a muslim. Certain restaurants in South Korea have banned Americans. The only thing I ever hear about abroad the U.S. now are questions about Bush-”Why do Americans like him? What’s the deal?” In 2000 I never got questioned like this, or received scowls of disapproval when I told people I was American the way I do now.
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I feel that the next election in 2008 will be the true litmus test for the soul of America, whether or not we choose to choose a reality-based president who is willing to try undo the mistakes of the past eight years and learn from them, or we elect a misguided grandstanding megalomaniac like Giuliani who will surely continue on the same blinded, self-destructive course we’ve been on during the Bush years. I still have hope that the United States can assume a leadership role in the world-if the Giulianis and Bushes are shown the door and reality-based leadership can assume power. Hopefully it won’t be too late, and I hope one day I can look back and say to myself that the memories I have of that day finally led to some good in the world, in the form of mutual understanding instead of war and hatred.
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