“NOT SINCE PEARL HARBOR …” were the first words I heard as I flicked on the TV that brilliant blue-skyed Tuesday morning. My Dad had been at Pearl Harbor during the bombing. In fact, he’d had to dive for his life as an enemy plane sprayed bullets about him, interrupting an also serene morning -- that time a Sunday -- as he strolled to the mess hall. He’d always reported the event with fresh passion, as though it had happened yesterday.
I took the commentator’s startling words seriously but skeptically. What could begin to parallel the attack on Pearl Harbor?
Horrifying, mesmerizing images appeared on the screen. My mind protested what I was seeing. Planes striking the Towers. Gigantic billows of smoke pierced by flames. A relentless assault on reason. To witness the actual collapse of those two architectural icons. Impossible. That it had occurred -- was occurring over and over before my eyes -- and only miles from me. The southern tip of my city.
The Twin Towers. I had worked there once as a temp. Had shopped there, last time when I'd had jury duty. Had had a celebratory birthday brunch for a friend at a classy restaurant on the ground floor. Had transferred subways there.
Maybe knew people working there on this fateful day … DEAR LORD. THE PEOPLE!!! My heart could only begin to catch on at that point to the human toll. The 9 a.m. population of a New York office building.
And those buildings, the mother (and father) of all corporate office buildings!
GOD BLESS THOSE WHO HAD BEEN KILLED. GOD BLESS THEIR LOVED ONES. The reporters had already begun taking stabs at estimating the fatalities. STAGGERING!
As an accident it was horrifying enough. But to be diabolically planned and executed by terrorists? SURREAL. I think I experienced the essence of the word SURREAL those initial moments. Every TV network struggled to get on top of the story with incoming photographic footage, eye-witness interviews and commentary. How could they possibly? Even now.
What about someone gaining control of the mind-numbing danger we all were apparently in? Vulnerable to! Our comfortable illusion of safety was shattered. WHAT MORE TO COME?
I looked down at the remote in my hand and thought of the quirky old movie, Being There. Peter Seller’s character, Chauncey Gardener, a sheltered mentally and emotionally challenged man stumbles forth into the real world to be confronted by a mugger. Undaunted, Chauncey extends his arm with the remote wand at the end of it and CLICKS. He is perplexed when it does not alter his reality. Zip him to a safer dimension for the perpetually passive. I had that same stubborn, retarded faith as I watched the screen. My mind, let alone heart, refusing or unable to wrap itself around the vast perimeters of such trauma. It had to be retracted, disclaimed, shut off or escaped. SOMEHOW!!!!
My phone wasn’t working. There was a bleeping noise when I picked up the receiver. I logged on to my computer and managed to access my e-mails. A dear brother’s instant message popped onto the screen. He’d been sitting patiently in California hoping to verify my safety. My fingers typed quickly and gratefully that I was okay. I had just woken up, rallied by the relentless sirens of fire trucks, ambulances, police cars roaring down Lexington Avenue. It helped to express my dismay. To sense his gratitude for my well being. Too soon our exchange ended. I was left again staring dumbfounded at the TV reports. Listening to reporters who so uncharacteristically were humbled and cowed by the event that they were reporting on. An event that they themselves, along with me and the rest of the country, were all the victims of.
I jumped when the phone rang. It was working again. An invitation from my likable supervisor to come in and help cover the evening word-processing shift at the law firm. Since I lived in Manhattan I was closer than most. Some of the scheduled workers understandably had either transportation or personal reasons for not making it in she explained.
INDEED! YOU WANT ME TO WHAT??? COME IN TONIGHT???
But it is an international firm, she reminded me ... and blah blah blah.
I declined easily. I disliked disappointing her. Circumstances had kept her stuck there but I knew in my place she herself would have refused. Yes, I was often hungry for overtime. Yet I knew I needed time to begin to process what was happening. I could feel my “jitters” multiplying. I’d logged too many years in therapy to minimize my own needs in the face of trauma.
It was a law firm, after all, NOT a damn hospital!
Also, to go in on such a day and perhaps end up at the mercy of a workaholic attorney emotionally disconnected from the direness of this situation. That would be too insufferable and crazymaking. Enduring such a personality was trying enough on a good day.
Finally and honestly, my child self was frightened to set her toe out of the shelter of the apartment at that point.
***
That was all nine months ago. It is a relief to be out of the first stages of the crisis, when all of us, particularly in New York, were experiencing such high levels of stress on a daily basis. Stress more typical of episodic moments of crisis, not chronic ones. Psychologically akin to surviving a car accident. Only imagine surviving a car accident, say, every day for three months! Three months it had taken, I'd guess, for me to BEGIN to feel an emotional shift out of the horror.
The anthrax threat had brought new dimensions of anxiety with a seemingly psychological sadism on one's imagination.
In a Dunkin Donuts one morning during that first week I noted white dust on the countertop. My mind conceived anthrax, not powdered sugar. Opening the mail each day was a conscious act of courage. My mellow and friendly mailman, Ralph, was noticeably (and justifiably) uptight and unhappy in his aquamarine latex glovess.
Having security guards pawing awkwardly through my pocketbook before I entered bookstores, malls, stores, schools or my workplace was an odd sensation. Intrusive as the searches were, they often didn’t seem earnest enough to me to catch up with a halfway resourceful saboteur. The men and women were awkward and embarrassed. Low-batteried robots.
Lili Tomlin once said, “We’re all in this alone.” Seems especially apt for the recovery of 9/11. We were all collectively touched by the crisis. Some far more tragically than others. Yet each person had his or her own prescription and pathway for coping and recovering.
I opted not to take the subway for a brief period, having been spooked by speculation on a TV news show that this would be an effective way for anthrax dissemination. I soon discovered that it was too expensive and inconvenient a phobia to sustain. Cabs were costly. I often could not afford the time it took to travel above ground. I watched myself in amazement, especially on days when I was particularly exhausted from a grueling, overnight workshift, easily surrender my vow of self-protection. With a “what the hell,” I’d trot down the subways stairs, slide my Metro card through the turnstile slot, and defiantly hop the underground car. I began risking the gauntlet more and more often.
And the thousands of posters of missing loved ones taped all over midtown. I don't want to address that phenomenon, even now. Thousands of pictures of the smiling victims of mass murder. A religiously ferocious sustaining of denial by their willful survivors. Their particular loved one somehow had not been instantly pulverized by the explosions, but was somewhere walking about, temporarily dazed, but alive.
I wonder where we, the actual dazed survivors, a whole nation of us, are now, collectively -- psychologically speaking. What’s going on in the subterranean recesses of our psyches? There is always a psychic residue left with the victim after trauma. The mental template supporting one’s existential sense of security becomes indelibly altered.
The dramatic symbol of our wounding? A seven story pit in southern Manhattan where the Towers had once gloriously loomed.
Have we stretched emotionally and spiritually? Or have so many of us waded back into the shallows of denial? Was the reprioritizing of our values a temporary exercise? Did having our sacred rights and privileges as U.S. citizens altered and endangered change our perspectives profoundly or did some of us indulge in a temporary or not so temporary bout of superstitious patriotic sentimentality-- or full-out jingoism -- for the sake of psychological security?
We are to varying degrees more hypervigilant today and, paradoxically, more desensitized. Protection against another ambush. Life proved it can deliver profound collective terror. Will such a horrifying adventure in the long run result in an emotional hardiness and deepening of spirit? Or will it bring an emotional hardness and thickening of skin? Maybe both at given times or to given persons.
* * *
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While this was a terrible, terrible thing to happen to America and the world, in a matter of days, maybe hours, the people who run this world, and I, like you, don't really know who they are, set about on their nefarious schemes to rob our treasury of untold billions and maybe even a trillion dollars, while sacrificing hundreds of thousands of men women and children to enrich themselves. This will be the one and only 9-11 post I will comment on. I will not write a post about it, although I am thinking of writing one about 9-10 and how the powers that be have rammed this terrorism business down our throats and took away our Constitutional rights. It must have been hell living in New York at the time, I watched it from a safe distance in North Carolina and still didn't know if perhaps they had nuclear weapons or some type of chemical weapons. Osama Bin Laden did what he wanted, ten times over, he cost us our national treasure, our blood and our feeling of always being safe in our own country. This will be remembered as long as Pearl Harbor, and should be!
hi libby.
the "new normal"-- [a phrase by dick cheney]:
1+1==3
the "new normal"-- [a phrase by dick cheney]:
1+1==3
The horror of that attack lasted for a few hours. The aftermath for a few days or weeks. Do any of you give any thought to the horror your nation puts others through, Korea, Viet Nam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name but a few?
And y’all don’t do it for “good” reasons. You do it as part of your “we’re gonna rule the world" military strategy and for profit!!!
And you citizens let, even encourage, your government to do this because of some weird, sick notion that you have about “American exceptionalism”.
And you all act like you have no idea why this would be done to you....... well, my friends, look at the site below, if you have the guts to see why.
Rest assured that were you people ever to do to my children, my people, and my country what you’ve done elsewhere, I’ll hunt you down and deal with you till the day I die.
http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm
.
And y’all don’t do it for “good” reasons. You do it as part of your “we’re gonna rule the world" military strategy and for profit!!!
And you citizens let, even encourage, your government to do this because of some weird, sick notion that you have about “American exceptionalism”.
And you all act like you have no idea why this would be done to you....... well, my friends, look at the site below, if you have the guts to see why.
Rest assured that were you people ever to do to my children, my people, and my country what you’ve done elsewhere, I’ll hunt you down and deal with you till the day I die.
http://www.rawa.org/s-photos.htm
.
Sickest of all is that my country, my Canada, helps you in your insane endeavours. I burn in shame.
.
.
I watched from Trinidad. Somber indeed. Trinidad is a small country and 14 Trinidadians perished that day.
nice post, fyi I included it in an open salon essay collection/compilation and my own 911 analysis commentary here
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