Sept. 11, 2001 – My Day

It was sunny. When is it not sunny on a September day in Tempe, Arizona? Mostly in the late afternoon when the “monsoon” moisture builds up and unleashes a thunderstorm, but mornings usually are hot and sunny, with fluffy clouds, portents of the afternoon dust-ups, in the air.

I had just got up and was making breakfast when the phone rang. We’re three hours behind the East Coast at this time of year.

I had not turned on a TV or anything. So I answered the phone, not suspecting anything. My mother, who survived as a kid under bombing raids during World War II, was hysterical on the phone. "How could people do that?" she repeated in a trembling shout maybe three or four times. I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying. I thought somebody had hurt one of my siblings. I couldn’t imagine what else would make her sound so outright panicked. She was not one to cry or explode in anger all that much. It took real provocation and I couldn’t imagine what it was in this case.

I told her that it was still early out here and that I’m just getting up, so maybe she could calm down and fill me in on what’s got her upset.

That’s when she told me step by step about the planes and that the towers had collapsed. It was just unreal to us, even when we saw those damn TV images repeated again and again over the next few days. What was real was that I had an appointment at a doctor’s office that day. What was totally eerie was driving up the road to his office – our house was south of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, so driving north we would consistently see a stream of planes cross east to west as they took off or west to east in their final approach – and there was not an airplane in the sky. The sight of empty skies was real and it brought home the reality of the attack more than the televised images of the destruction.

For all the shock and all the grief, anger and terror that I felt, my day proceeded as normal, although I felt like a ghost drifting through these activities. My kids, the youngest was 14, watched the news. They lay about the living room knowing they weren’t going to play video games on the TV today and they watched. Like me, they went about the day doing the normal things as far as any casual observer could see.

After the doctor’s appointment, I went to Borders to buy Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft,” which was released that day. I went home to listen to it, amid the background noise of the TV reports.

I was a freelance writer then and I was part of an online group of freelancers and we shared our thoughts and observations.

I know that I wrote -- in response to someone who said that the day’s attacks changed everything -- something like, “Nothing has changed between yesterday and today. There was a threat of a terror attack on the United States yesterday and for years before that, and there is still a threat of a terror attack on the United States tomorrow and for years to come.” What had changed was that Americans no longer had the privilege of ignoring that threat, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think the nation – at least the generations who were alive to witness those events – has been suffering a mass case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. This nationwide PTSD has exacerbated trends that were already on the upswing in national politics, ideas that politics is a zero-sum game that needs resolution only by total defeat of the opposing side. When we faced our next crises, whether the Great Recession of 2008 or the COVID-19 pandemic, we were unable to coalesce the way we were in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. We had a common enemy, and it produced a moment of solidarity as a nation, but that wouldn’t last long.

I was emailing an awful lot in those days and one email communication in particular stood out to me. It was from my friend, Peter, whom I’ve known since we were in high school back in the Stone Age.

I had sent him an email on Thursday, 9/13, wondering how he was doing, given this earthquake of an event. He worked at BMG in those days and still lives in New York City. This is what he wrote back:

“Sal,

“Thanks for sending this e-mail. I've been thinking of you, was going to call, etc.; what can I say.

“Yes, you're right, BMG is in Mid-Town. On Tuesday I could see the plumes of smoke from our conference room on the 32nd floor, I went up to the 38th floor, as I looked out of the window I saw the first tower collapse, I turned away with tears in my eyes. I left my building around 12:30, not sure if I should stay in the Times Square area; went to a local bar, a psychotherapist was sitting to my left and a guy who used to work for the CIA was to my right … So drinking Margaritas and watching TV with these two was actually fascinating. The female therapist kept handing me cigarettes, I kept smoking them.

"Last night, I went over to visit a friend who worked 2-1/2 blocks south of the WTC. He spoke of hearing the second aircraft and noticing in his peripheral vision, then looking out his window and seeing the plane bank and crash into the tower. How all hell broke loose, hysteria, he took two disabled people down the elevator, they got to the lobby, and chaos pursued, people were trying to get out of the street into the building as people were trying to get out of the building into the street. He got out, ran for his life, all he could think of was his son in school on 23rd street and ran straight for the school.

“I think he is in a state of shock, his wife is concerned about him, I said let him tell that story as many times as he wants to, physically he's fine.

“What horror, it's so hard to believe. I don't know anyone who worked down there other than my friend mentioned above. It still remains [to be seen] what the casualty toll will be.

Another friend lives (he's in early retirement and was home) in Jersey City on the 20th floor with a terrace that looks out toward the Twin Towers; he saw the whole thing from his apartment, I think he is in a state of shock, perhaps all of New York City is, some more than others. I walked to work the last two days, noticed the mood, there is less vehicular traffic, this is a grim time here in the Big Apple, a big chunk has been taken.

“Again, Sal I will keep in touch.

“Hope all is well with you and your family.

“Peter”

 

It was real, but those of us far away went about our days like normal, but with that “big chunk” that Peter mentioned taken out of us as well. But you too know that, don’t you?

Copyright © 2021, Salvatore Caputo

Sept. 11, 2001: The Prequel

“Everything has changed. Nothing will be the same,” or some version of that sentiment was repeated over and over in the days after the airliners were used as guided missiles.

I didn’t feel that way then, and I don’t now.

The world – as beautiful and full of light as it is – is a fundamentally dangerous place. No one is guaranteed the next second.

Fundamentally, the only thing that had changed was that a terrorist attack against the United States shattered all previous records of success (from the terrorist point of view).

There was a magazine called Scanlan’s, published in 1970 and 1971, that survived at least eight issues doing controversial journalism. What I believe was their final issue had to be printed in Canada because it exposed how much guerrilla warfare (call it terrorism depending on your point of view) was going on in the United States. Assembling reports from across country spanning Feb. 12, 1965 to Sept. 7, 1970, the editors compiled 23 pages of about 56 instances per page (some pages had fewer some had more) of sabotage and terrorism in the United States. That’s just about 1,300 incidents, and while some seem to be more readily validated as terror and some seem like they might just be “regular” crime, the last two pages alone contained reports of 39 bombings across the United States from June 12 to Sept. 7, 1970.

You may never have heard about it. According to the editors of the magazine, they had to print that issue in Canada because unionized lithographers threatened the printing companies where they worked with sabotage if they went ahead with printing the magazine. Freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one, but only if that person doesn’t piss off a group of employees it would appear.

OK. So that was a long time ago in a time that was crazier perhaps than even today. So let’s skip ahead to the 1990s.

•      Feb. 26, 1993. The World Trade Center was attacked. A van rented by Mohammad Salameh exploded in the center’s underground garage, blasting out a 100-foot crater in the structure, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand others with everything from minor wounds to crushed limbs. The FBI says a SWAT team captured Salameh on March 4, 1993 “as he tried in vain to get his $400 deposit back.” An Islamic fundamentalist, he had worked with others ­ among them, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Ahmed Ajaj – according to the FBI. All four were tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. There is more to this story because the mastermind of the plot was on the run. “We’d learned his name—Ramzi Yousef—within weeks after the attack and discovered he was planning more attacks, including the simultaneous bombing of a dozen U.S. international flights. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in February 1995, returned to America, and convicted along with the van driver, Eyad Ismoil. A seventh plotter, Abdul Yasin, remains at large.” You read that right. He’s still on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrrorists list. They had wanted to topple one tower into the other, causing both to fall.

OK, Boomer, praise the Millennial attitude!

Millennials get a lot of grief from Boomers and from GenZers, but it seems to me the Millennial generation brought a change of mind-set about consumerism that is fairly important and not fully appreciated.

If you’re not familiar with demographics and especially the names popularly applied to U.S. population cohorts, here’s a quick guide:

• Remember that these definitions are porous because a generation is considered to be roughly two decades and we look at decades through our numbering system, as though somebody born in 1939 is radically different from someone born in 1940. However, that 1939 cohort would have stretched back to 1920, and there’s quite a bit of difference between the experiences of that individual and those of a person born in 1940.
• Those old enough to have served in World War II (roughly born from 1900 through 1920) are often called the Greatest Generation, after a book that Tom Brokaw wrote describing how they survived the Great Depression and sacrificed during the war.
• The generation born from about 1920 through 1940 really doesn’t have a popular name, and they would have come of age in the postwar period and through the Korean conflict. (They were sometimes called the Forgotten Generation, but that name has been more popularly applied to a later cohort.)
• The Baby Boomers are the huge population cohort born from the end of World War II (1945) through 1964. I’m part of this generation, which one demographer described as moving through time like “a pig in a python” creating all kinds of disturbances as it passes through each decade of life, including a looming health-care crisis as the Boomers become older and older seniors.
• The newer Forgotten Generation is Generation X. They were born roughly from 1965 through 1980.
• The reason Generation X is forgotten is because it was framed on either side by huge attention-hog generations: the Baby Boomers and the Millennials (aka Generation Y). Millennial and Boomer antipathy also plays into it. The Millennials are not necessarily digital-native, meaning the Internet and personal computing weren’t necessarily part of their early lives if they were born in the early 1980s. However, latter-day Millennials, those born in the late 1990s, pretty much are digital natives, used to having computers as, shall we say, playmates before they began using them as work tools.
• Generation Z is social-media native, which manifests today in platforms like Tik-Tok, not Facebook, Boomer!

Getting back to the Millennials not being fully appreciated: