I was in "gorgeous" Prince Georges County, Maryland. It was a Tuesday. We had a Tuesday routine: drive up Route 1 to Laurel, stop and see a massage client, stop at some favorite stores, drive on to Columbia, change the library books, buy take-out meals on the mall, eat and walk around the Centennial Lake Park, stop at other favorite stores. It was an absolutely gorgeous day and I was looking forward to it. I called the massage client and heard, "I think I should cancel. I don't think you should come out today. Did you see the news? Somebody just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center."
"Was someone youall knew on the plane?"
"I don't think so but they think it might have been some kind of act of war. We're all watching the news. We might want to get out of here."
I put down the phone and turned to my husband. "They don't even know who was on the plane, but they're all in mourning because a plane crashed in New York. Do you want to watch that on the news?"
"It'll be in the Post tomorrow. Let's go on as usual." I spent a lot of time at the library in Columbia because on Tuesdays my husband either took a continuing education course for tutors of disabled children, or tutored one of them, for a good part of the day. We loaded up the books we were taking back. It was not one of the days when I took the Practically Perfect Toshiba laptop. We stopped at the Amvets charity store, a very large store with a furniture showroom and some pay phones. In those days a local phone call cost a quarter, and long-distance calls could be made from a pay phone if you had a lot of coins to feed into it, by ones, or if you had a prepaid "calling card." I had a few of those cards in my pocket along with library cards and store membership cards and my Metrorail Farecard. I went into the store and browsed my way to the aisle where the yarn was, if they had any. They didn't. Behind that aisle was a glass pane enclosing the room with the TV, radio, and stereo sets. All of them were tuned to the news.
By that time the second plane had hit the second tower and the third one had hit the Pentagon. The Pentagon was designed and built for security rather than as a show of hubris; the section of it that could be hit by the plane was a little-used storage section, but of course people had been on the plane, including Barbara Olson, an emerging author who'd become popular.
I looked around and saw that I was one of a row of people staring at the row of TV sets. Some of them were making cell phone calls. English was not most of their first language--the Amvets store employed a lot of foreign-born military wives, and was the store where you couldn't always count on finding anyone who spoke even Spanish, but that was the attraction for other immigrants who spoke the other languages the staff used. I didn't yet have a cell phone so I power-walked to the front wall of the store and punched in the numbers from a "calling card." Mother needed to know that I was safe in rural Maryland and wouldn't come home unless civilians were evacuated, as in the Gulf War. So did Aunt Dotty. I didn't use up a lot of minutes but quite a long line had formed behind me when I put down the phone. I didn't buy anything.
"There were two more planes," I told my husband. "One of them hit the Pentagon. They think it's war."
"Don't panic," my husband said. People were rushing out of the store, with or without purchases, heading home to pack in case they had to evacuate. Since we had our separate homes outside the city, we didn't feel that urgent need to pack; I'd take the laptop, my knitting, and the new batch of library books I intended to check out, but clothes and toothbrushes were waiting at home. "We can go on with the day and hear the news tonight."
The library was closed; we dropped the books into the chute. We bought food, ate, and started walking around the lake as usual. About halfway around we met a couple of park rangers in an ATV. "We're sorry, but there was a fourth plane that crashed into a field. We don't know how many more planes these people may have hijacked. We're closing the park. Could you walk out with us please."
All the stores were closed. Outside a store a teenager was leaning on a wall, fiddling with a cell phone. "When I woke up," he felt a need to tell us, "I thought this was going to be the best day in America. I did not know it was going to be the worst day in America."
We went home and turned on the television. Months went by when nobody turned it on. That afternoon we sat in front of it, hoping for fresh news and not seeing any. "I see Stephanopoulos landed on his feet," my husband said, and I said, "Good for him. That takes care of the list of people I know in New York. You?"I was wrong, of course. A few friends and relatives had been there, and I hadn't heard. At least none of them was hurt in the fire. Everybody always knows a few people in New York City.
"I used to know lots of people in New York," my husband said.
"Well that's the fifth time they've shown us that woman in the orange jacket, coughing," I said. "We can't do anything for those people but we could at least not watch them."
"I can watch the little TV set upstairs," my husband said. "In case they start releasing names. I know it's early but I'd like to see the names."
I was starting to feel manipulated. The television set wasn't telling people anything new; only blaring fear, rage, and war. I thought the emotion might have been worth sitting through if the screen had been running a list of people known to have survived or not survived, but that was days away. The coughing woman was flashed on the screen in between images of children dancing in some Middle Eastern desert town. Could even Arabs have trained children to dance joyously, rather than angrily, in celebration of war? (Later we heard that they couldn't; what the children were celebrating was an annual town festival.) People who were normally in favor of peace were suddenly in favor of war. I did not want to be manipulated into supporting war, as were the people who'd always seemed civilized who were out on the streets, the next day, waving signs saying "Reduce Kabul to rubble." Clearly there would have to be some sort of reprisals. I hoped they could be done efficiently. Didn't we have firepower several hundred times greater than the Al-Qaeda fools had? Go in, get them out, and hang them high as Haman, I was praying our troops would do. No modern war. No blowing up hospitals, no incendiary bombs dropped on babies. In 2001 baby-boomers' mental pictures of modern war included an old video of a little girl in Vietnam, running and screaming, her clothes burned away. She had survived, we'd been told. Not the kind of thing we wanted the young to see on the news.
News highlights of that evening included that generous Washingtonians had asked where to send the money, and embarrassed New Yorkers had declined offers of cash or blood, saying their city could take care of its own. I was glad. People would say awkwardly, off and on all winter, that they felt that "we were all New Yorkers or Washingtonians now," and I'd feel embarrassed for them. A lot of people had died; a lot of people were genuinely mourning. I felt something for them but I didn't think it would help to pretend that I, as a stranger, was feeling anything like their pain. I already knew what grief felt like. It was nice that people outside the family missed the person too, but trying to pretend they felt what the family felt merely made them sound stupid.
Introverts do feel empathy, but those of us who haven't been taught that the empathy we feel is the "wrong" kind feel empathy for other introverts and express empathy as to other introverts. I felt no urge to hug strangers. I murmured soothingly, a few times, when massage clients found that relaxation released tears of real grief.
Bland rich-boy W Bush suddenly became a trigger for intense emotions. In Washington we heard some things people in "the heartland" didn't hear. I heard W proclaiming that "they hate us because we are free," saw him signing the loathsome "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act" (a law that violates everyone's right to privacy), thought he was a hypocrite in the service of the Evil Principle. I went home and heard people saying that he certainly had become a target but they thought he was coping rather well. Yes, Sir. Yes, Ma'am. Whatever. Saying what I thought of W Bush at the time would have been treason. Twenty-five years later I don't know what W was thinking or why he let enemies of the people have the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, but I still want to see it extirpated from our law. I don't think Trump, or Cruz, or Vance, or Rubio, is the man to do that. Musk has the courage but not the ability to understand why it needs to be done. Massie, DeSantis, and Kennedy together might have enough fortitude and intelligence to do it. Maybe.
My husband listened to the "they hate us because we are free" speech and growled, "Yes, and there's a little matter of our support for Israel against the Palestinians. What about that?" I had no foreign policy. I said, "Hasn't he got the 'blond' act down, though!"
I'll say this, now, with hindsight. If you or your family are involved with the oil industry, you know Arab-type people and you know Israeli-type people. You might know a few young ones as nephews, nieces, or cousins, on both sides. This causes acute ambivalence when conflicts among the Semitic nations are mentioned. I think W Bush sincerely felt, as I did, that sense of "I hope this war won't harm my Arab-type friends who really are people of peace--not even defining peace as 'our nation dominant over yours'." It was not a question of loyalty. Bin Laden obviously needed what he eventually got, only maybe in an even more humiliating way; his goons needed to be locked up with a metal key, have the key recycled, and find out whether anybody cared to kick a bottle of water under the door. That had nothing to do with Halla or Feitan or Farouk or anyone else we knew. Most people in Washington in 2001, if they weren't bigots, had Muslim friends. I had an adoptive brother who had rallied the whole Islamic Centre crowd to support my business, and had often said, when asked why I didn't attend any church regularly, that the kind of fellowship that would justify attending church on a day of rest was something I'd only found among Muslims--their sex-phobic culture has encouraged them to take sex-free friendship very seriously--but I was still a Christian.
Anyway...nobody was asked to flee the city, as in the Gulf War, and I was glad. "Show no fear" was the order of the day. Tourists, however, did stop coming to Washington. The city seemed oddly vacant without them. You did not, in fact, hear a visitor squeal with surprise the first time the farecard machine sucked the card out of their hands, scanned it, and stamped the remaining value on it, every day. You did not think of that as something you'd ever miss...but early in the spring, when I finally heard that sound again, I was surprised by how much I'd missed it.
W Bush had proposed, unsatisfactorily, that we could "be tourists in our own town," which showed it wasn't his town. His money came from oil. A lot of people's money came from our city's very own economy, which dived down in 2001. Cartoonists, at least, had fun with the idea of spending money to boost the economy. "What did you do in the Gulf War, Daddy?"--"I charged!"I paid cash, and that winter I didn't have much of it.
Scattered through the city were people going through real grief. Everyone was trying to respect those people and their feelings. I suppose I still am. I shed a few tears when I met the people who'd lost parents or children on those planes. Mostly I felt tired of the endless emoting in what passed for the news media, and the way it was being manipulated to drum up support for "modern war," and the grief piled on grief as the Post started to report young people being injured or killed in the war.
What I lost twenty-five years ago, what all of us lost, was a substantial chunk of our natural pre-constitutional right to privacy. We need to be demanding that back, while we still can.
The fire fighters running into the burning, crumbling buildings, to remove injured people if they found any alive...I think the best thing W said about the whole war was that we could direct some of the emotion toward supporting and encouraging fire fighters. That, at least, is a good thing. Most people are not built to be professional firemen or police officers but all of us could benefit from some training to be able to cope with emergencies when they are not available. All of us could appreciate the special skills and training the professionals have.
Where were you on this day in 2001?
