Twenty years ago here on the West Coast, the alarm woke me to the news on NPR that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. Was it grogginess, naiveté, or refusal to fathom horrific possibility in those first minutes that made me assume at first it was a terrible, freak accident? The second plane struck as I listened. It became clear that we were under attack.
My husband Jonathan was at a conference in Atlanta. We didn’t know when—or how–he’d be able to get home. While our daughters slept, I called my mother-in-law, who hadn’t yet heard the news. When I told her, she said, “This will be the end of democracy as we know it.”
Prescient, my mother-in-law.
It was time to wake the girls for school, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want them to leave behind the blissful oblivion of sleep, of the life they had lived thus far, or explain to them what had happened. I didn’t want them to go to school. I didn’t want any of us to leave the house, ever.
Since it was the beginning of the school year, Ally, 10, had invariably caught a cold—sick, like clockwork, every September. I used that as an excuse to stash her in a quiet corner in my office while I worked a reduced schedule. Emma, 13, painted her toenails red, white, and blue, and went off to school. She soon added to her list of reasons why we should get her a cellphone the ability to call out from a pile of rubble. Ally was more noticeably upset than her sister. She announced she was mad at Grandpa for inventing bombs (my father had been a scientist on the Manhattan Project). When I asked if she was worried about war, she replied philosophically, “Yeah, but I just try to stay out of trouble.”
What I most remember is wanting to hold them close, always, and how incomplete we felt without Jonathan home with us. Somehow he made it back from Atlanta after just two days’ delay. (When he needed to travel to Boston two months later, it was Emma who became distraught.)
We never subjected the girls—or ourselves–to endless replay of the towers smoking, burning, collapsing. We watched very little TV, laying eyes on the horror only once or twice. That was more than enough. Instead I devoured stories in the newspaper, particularly stories of unbelievable acts of kindness and courage.
I remember George W. Bush, caught like a deer in the headlights, reading a story about a goat to school children when he learned of the attacks. I remember members of Congress, joining hands and singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps after the doomed passengers of United Flight 93 crashed their hijacked plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of its intended target. I remember the President saying something decent and good about our Muslim brethren. Then, more alarmingly, he urged us to go shopping, and announced to the world that “You’re either with us or against us.”
A colleague at a conference by renowned trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk later reported that he’d said, in response to Bush’s us-vs-them comment, “I knew then that our goose was cooked.”
Stories of goodness started to give way to a thirst for vengeance, escalating rhetoric and militarism. Only Representative Barbara Lee voted against handing Bush a blank check with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force. (She and my mother-in-law are cut from the same cloth.)
We began to bomb Afghanistan. Soon after, our home town became internationally famous because John Walker Lindh—aka the American Taliban—grew up here. Emma was double cast with his sister in their 8th grade theater production. Luckily, John’s sister was able to shine in the spotlight for the first two performances, before the news about her brother broke. At least she was not robbed of that.
Often I post something a bit more hopeful to commemorate what happened twenty years ago, but these days I find hope more elusive. The trauma of 9/11 will be with us for a long time. There are still acts of unbelievable kindness and courage, but bleakness blankets the world. Fear and uncertainty have upended the social fabric, spawning a surveillance state, conspiracy theories, and two disastrous wars. Countless lives are lost and treasure squandered. There’s a clear thread between the terrorists who aimed a hijacked plane at the heart of government and the domestic terrorists who staged an insurrection at the Capitol just this January.
After the planes struck, it took a while for the towers to collapse. Those planes struck 20 years ago, and we have been in a delayed collapse ever since.