Thoughts about "today" September 11

I was sitting at my desk in my corner office on Wall Street in NYC. My secretary had gone out to run an errand at lunchtime. When she returned she came into my office and said, “I was on the subway and I heard a rumor that there was an explosion at the World Trade Center.” I automatically looked out of my northwest facing window, even though I could not see the towers from my office, as I was only on the 16th floor and higher buildings blocked my view. “I’ll try to find out more,” she said and left. In a while she came back and said, “There are people staggering into our building with soot blackening their faces. They were in the World Trade Center when the explosion occurred." I looked out the window and saw the first helicopters arrive, trying to rescue people from the rooftop of the World Trade Center. New York City had been attacked. And no, this was not September 11, 2001. This was years before, when a huge explosion in the parking garage of the World Trade Center had rocked but not thrown down the building. There was not the Internet then, the way there was in 2001, and certainly not like there was today. So people heard what was going on from first hand witnesses, as people who worked at our bank and had been attending meetings at WTC staggered back to their offices to share the news. I lived in New Jersey and actually commuted by subway or ferry (depending on the schedule and my mood) to the World Trade Center. Those of us living in NJ knew that the subway would be out, so at the end of an early day, three of us walked together toward the WTC to go to the ferry dock aboveground, just beyond the WTC. We walked through the “canyons” of NY until we got to a pedestrian overpass just southwest of the WTC where we could have our first view of the scene. It had been about five hours since the explosion. As far as the eye could see the West Side highway, all six lanes, was packed with rescue vehicles. Fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, investigative units had jammed tight the highway, with flashing lights as the cold misty dusk of a winter night approached. I don’t remember us saying very much; we just gazed upon this remarkable sight. It was later at our homes, listening to the evening news, that we heard specifics of what had happened, and projected casualties. I thought I didn’t know any of the victims, as I heard their names, though I’ve heard later that one of them may have known me. As the perpetrators were caught, in large part due to their own simplistic errors, there was actually some laughter about what dummies they were (renting trucks in their own name, etc.) People laughed at the thought that they may had hoped to bring down a tower. No one asked my opinion. But I’ve seen the Berlin Wall during the Cold War, and I’ve run from a reported IRA attack on a sunny day in London. And now, no one speaks of the first World Trade Center attack, and everyone says “the war on terror began on September 11.” Turns out a NYC security expert who had also seen the work of the IRA had warned the Port Authority years before this attack that driver self parking in the WTC was a huge terrorism risk. The date of that report was August 6, 1984. The date of the first World Trade Center attack was February 26, 1993.

So today when people memorialize and remember the tragedy of September 11, 2001, I think as I often do of the tragedy of missed opportunity, and of self inflated impious smarty pants. And as I listen to “analysis” about Islamic fundamental terrorism, I wonder where the analysis was when Christian terrorists in the UK killed each other and civilians for decades. By the way I was a huge supporter of Pope John Paul II excommunicating IRA "Catholics." I nonverbally urged him to do even more; I thought he should have excommunicated swaths of their supporters too. Oh well.

Here is just some humorous color commentary about an otherwise humorless day, back in 1993. I remember that one of my vendors who marketed software to me had a wife who had just been hired to work for the pop star Mariah Carey. Her job was to redo Mariah Carey’s image from youthful and innocent to, well, how shall I put it, slutty. He would brag to me about his wife getting this great assignment for working with a celebrity. It was the first time that someone had spoken to me about a celebrity and their image, and I was honestly amazed (and still am) at what was then just the beginning of a tidal wave of visual and actual promiscuity and coarsening of so many in the industry. I was overweight and personally extremely unhappy at the time (about to divorce my secular Jewish husband) and I was well aware that he shared this news with me as a way to make kind of a dig at me. I think I was supposed to feel bad about who I am. I actually feel bad about what God’s children have become. This was a time when my Catholicism was under deep cover, and I was aware of spiritual attacks on me, of course, as I have been since the earliest age. You would not believe the things I know about what people are really thinking. Anyway, there is a link between the year Mariah Carey decided on a, um, “sexier” image change and the first ignored attack on the World Trade Center, ha, like the six degrees of separation Kevin Bacon game I guess. It was also the time when I was collecting donated books and magazines to give to a Native American library (people gave me the worst stuff, by the way) and was criticized by my French boss for not doing something important like building a hospital for the Indians. The USA has become a very strange country within a very strange world; believe me, one with a growing spiritual vacancy that is terrifying if anyone ever really thinks about it. 1993 was one of those years when the family was rapidly dissolving, personal relationships became a cynical joke, and only “the grand gestures with maximum publicity” mattered. So how ironic that as this country raves about national security and the war on terror, hardly anyone but me remembers the first attack and those lost at the World Trade Center.