Ten Years Later

I wasn’t supposed to be in New York that morning.

I was living in Jersey City, across the river. But my last day of work had been the previous Friday, and I was taking a two-week break before starting my new job. At one point I was thinking of flying to Europe during the week of September 10, or maybe to San Francisco. Instead I decided to stay local.

The days leading up to it are encased in amber in my memory.

On Friday night, September 7, I had a falling out at the Phoenix with a guy I’d been dating for a month, because he started making moves on a friend of a friend.

On Saturday night, September 8, I had what I still consider, to this day, to be my quintessential Manhattan experience. I impulsively shaved off the goatee I’d had all summer and decided to go back into the city, back to the Phoenix, to replace bad memories with good ones. I struck up a conversation with a stranger, who wound up becoming a good friend. At four in the morning, instead of taking the PATH back home, I decided to pull a Holden Caulfield and go for a long, solitary walk through the streets of Manhattan. I wound up walking all the way up to the Upper East Side, more than 90 blocks. Along the way, I saw a plastic bag floating in the air, just like in American Beauty; I peed in the ornate men’s room in the magnificent lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria; I sat on the deserted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the break of dawn and suddenly, surreally, saw hundreds of bicyclists ride by; and, for the first and still the only time in my life, I got cruised and picked up by a guy on the sidewalk. After we walked together for five blocks, he said he was too fucked up to do anything, so we parted ways.

I finally got home at 8 a.m., Sunday morning, September 9, exhausted and in love with Manhattan.

On Monday, September 10, I decided to visit Brooklyn Heights. I took the PATH to the World Trade Center concourse, bought a banana, browsed at the WTC branch of Borders, and then took the subway to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn Heights, I came across Plymouth Church, where presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln spoke out against slavery in February 1860. I’m pretty sure I also walked along the Brooklyn promenade and admired the skyline of lower Manhattan. On the way home, I stopped at the Gap in the WTC concourse and bought a t-shirt. Then I went home.

In the normal course of events I would have gone to bed that night and woken up the next morning at home in my apartment in Jersey City. I used to turn my phone’s ringer off when I slept, so I wouldn’t have woken up when my mom called me the next morning sometime after 9:00. Would I have turned the ringer back on and checked for messages? Or would I have heard people in the street, and would I have gone downstairs to Christopher Columbus Drive and stared at the burning towers directly across the river? My street ran east toward the Hudson River, directly toward the World Trade Center, and from the street there was always such a beautiful view of the twin towers: morning, sunset, or night, they always looked stunning, and sometimes I’d think of my friend Doug Ketcham from college who worked there — I was pretty sure he worked somewhere around the 100th floor — and I’d feel bad that we never got together socially.

But the normal course of events didn’t happen. I went online, and I met a guy, and I went back into Manhattan, and I spent the night at his place on West 10th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, near the Jefferson Market Library. The next morning his A/C was on, and it drowned out most outside noise; when I heard screaming from the street, I thought it must have been a rally for one of New York City’s mayoral candidates, since it was primary day.

I left his place at about 10:45 in the morning to walk to the 9th Street PATH station and go home. But something seemed weird. There was no traffic moving up Sixth Avenue. I walked to the intersection, and clumps of people were staring south. I looked south and I saw an enormous wall of gray smoke. I assumed a building was on fire. I asked a woman what had happened, and she told me that the World Trade Center had been blown up. (She said it had been done by the Palestinians.)

To this day, I still don’t really know how my brain processed that information. Unlike most people I know, I didn’t experience the events of that morning as a series of unfolding horrors: first plane hits (accident!), second plane hits (no, terrorism!), Pentagon gets hit, first tower falls, second tower falls. Since that morning, I’ve watched the news coverage numerous times, to the point where I sometimes think that I experienced it that way. But I didn’t. For me, it happened all at once. I thought it was a perfectly ordinary day, and then I learned that Hell had occurred.

My parents have sometimes joked with me that I’m oblivious. I was never as oblivious as I was that morning.

As for the rest of the day, I wrote about that ten years ago.

Ten years pass much more quickly than they used to.

I remember talking with my best friend in 1996 on the tenth anniversary of the Challenger explosion. The space shuttle had blown up on his 12th birthday, and we used to joke about what a crappy birthday it turned out to be for him. Ten years later, we were both 22. We couldn’t believe ten years had gone by; it made us feel old. In the previous ten years, I’d moved to Japan, come back to the U.S., gone through four years of college, graduated, and become a working adult. So much had happened in his life, too. We had literally grown up in that time.

It doesn’t feel like ten years have passed since 9/11. Yes, I was just 27 then; I didn’t know Matt; my brother had not yet met his wife; my niece was not even a twinkle in someone’s eye. Nobody had heard of Barack Obama; the iPod had not yet been announced; there was no iPhone, no Facebook, no YouTube; the first “Lord of the Rings” movie had not yet come out.

So much has happened. So why doesn’t it feel like any time has passed? Maybe it’s because we still live in the world that 9/11 created. The Challenger explosion was a single event with few national repercussions besides a temporary setback for the U.S. space program. But 9/11 is with us every day, and the weird thing is, we don’t even realize it. The idea of men standing outside Penn Station wearing fatigues and carrying guns used to seem like something out of a movie, but when it happens today I don’t bat an eye. I don’t even blink when someone at a Broadway theater asks me to open my bag. It doesn’t seem like New York has changed in ten years, but we forget the little ways in which it has changed. It’s comforting how easily human beings adapt, but it’s also unsettling.

My therapist’s office is on West 10th Street, off Sixth Avenue. Once a week I cross Sixth Avenue near Jefferson Market Library and walk through the intersection where I first looked south and learned what had happened. Each year, when I go to therapy on the day closest to September 11, I walk through that intersection and get an eerie feeling.

I remember, back then, thinking that one day it would be ten years since 9/11. I hoped we’d still be around, but I honestly wasn’t sure we would be. I wondered who would be president in 2011. I wondered what the world would be like, someday in the future, when we could look back and think of 9/11 as some distant event.

I’m still wondering when that will happen.

10 Years After Pearl Harbor

As a followup to my previous post, here’s a New York Times editorial from December 7, 1951, the 10th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. (It starts at the bottom of the left column, so you have to scroll down to begin reading.)

Even though World War II is not morally or legitimately equivalent to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, parts of the editorial feel eerily resonant today. Here are some excerpts.

DECADE OF FAME AND INFAMY

Ten tremendous years have passed since that terrible Sunday of Pearl Harbor which President Roosevelt described as “a day that will live in infamy.” …

When the American people woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, they were living in an age in which there still lingered some of the easy-going optimism of the nineteenth century. They still believed that without too much effort and too much pain things might be made to turn out all right. They knew about Hitler but many of them didn’t quite believe that he existed. They knew about Japanese imperialism but they couldn’t quite get it out of their heads that the Japanese, despite their foul record in China, wouldn’t get far in an up-to-date war.

These illusions perished along with many hundreds of men on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 7. …

… Pearl Harbor signed the death warrant of many thousands of men who did not die that day. It changed the whole lives of countless others. …

…Today we cannot look back to Pearl Harbor as men do “to old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago.” We lack the tranquility that might soften the ten-year-old tragedy. We lack the certainty that such tragedies will not be repeated. People in this city had an air-raid drill a few days ago. The conceivable enemy was not the Japanese and not the Germans. As we commemorate the dead of Pearl Harbor we may hope and pray that no such commemorations of a new Pearl Harbor will be exacted of our descendants or of ourselves grown older. But after ten years the struggle against absolutism is not yet finally won. …

10 Years After the JFK Assassination

Sunday, of course, is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I’ll probably write a more extensive post about it in a couple of days. In the meantime, I was curious to see how the 10th anniversary of JFK’s assassination was covered, so I dug into the New York Times archives and found an editorial dated November 22, 1973, which, in addition to being the 10th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, was also Thanksgiving Day. The nation was deep into Watergate. (And my mom was eight months pregnant with me.)

Here’s the text of the editorial (PDF here):

Ten Years Later

The shot that claimed the life of John F. Kennedy shortly after noon in Dallas ten years ago today will be remembered for more than the murder of a charismatic and promising young president; it marked the beginning of the end of an era filled with the ebullient optimism and confidence identified throughout the world with the spirit of America.

In retrospect, as remembrance of that tragedy coincides with Thanksgiving 1973, some of the Kennedy glitter may have been naively exuberant. The upbeat certainty that “we shall pay any price … to assure the survival and the success of liberty” around the globe seems extravagant today. A sadder but more realistic people has learned to question whether the world will ever again be this, or any, nation’s oyster – or can be made to conform to man’s noblest ideals and aspirations.

“The world is very different now,” John Kennedy said in his inaugural address. “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

More than a decade seems to separate John F. Kennedy’s world from today’s realities. The nuclear threat remains as great as he perceived it then, but to it have been added more subtle threats of an environment abused by man’s thoughtlessness and greed. The abolition of human poverty is a goal as elusive as ever.

* * *

This is not to say that the idealism with which a young President captured the imagination of so many young Americans failed to leave its imprint on national policies and individual lives. Many seeds of racial justice planted during the short Kennedy years were brought to fruition by Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil rights legislation. When President Kennedy refused to surrender to Governor Wallace’s defiant stand in the schoolhouse door, he could hardly have envisioned last week’s ceremony during which Mr. Wallace presided over the coronation of Alabama’s first black homecoming queen.

Progress toward racial equality at home has been matched by dramatic changes in America’s posture abroad. President Nixon has removed the diplomatic blindfold that for so long ignored the existence of 800 million Chinese. A constructive new pragmatism governs relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. These are no small accomplishments to mark on this Thanksgiving Day.

* * *

It would nevertheless be hypocritical to fail to recognize the deeply disturbing changes that have reshaped this country in the post-Kennedy decade. The brutal gunfire in Dallas was to become symbolic of an increasing resort to violence. Riots and fire ravaged urban ghettos. Political appeals to ignorance and selfishness needlessly divided the nation and substituted neglect for compassion.

If America is different now, the change needs to be measured and defined in terms of mood rather than of specific events and policies. Some of the exuberance has drained away. Years of a debilitating war have sapped American self-confidence and even self-respect. No nation is likely soon again to dominate the world’s economic scene or to hold out a credible promise to make the world safe for an ideal.

Americans have come up hard against inevitable limits. Even more jolting than the limits of power are the suddenly discovered limits of resources – energy, food, raw materials, everything. Americans face for the first time the possibility of an end to growth and expansion.

America is confronted, worst of all, by a debilitating loss of confidence in its institutions. The descent from the idealism and, perhaps, the euphoria of Camelot, gradual at first, has gathered precipitous momentum. The recent political scandals have shaken the country’s faith in itself.

John F. Kennedy could still call for “a grand and global alliance” in the “struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” The nation’s mood now calls for a more limited goal – a return to its basic principles. There are special grounds for thanksgiving today in the fact that the search for the road back has at least begun.

BTTF and 9/11

Yesterday afternoon, I turned on the TV and realized that my all-time favorite movie, “Back to the Future,” was on TNT, so I watched it until the end. At one point in the movie, Marty McFly is writing Doc Brown a letter to warn him that in the future he’ll be shot and killed. As he writes, he speaks the words aloud: “On the night that I go back in time, you will be shot and killed by terrorists.” But in the TNT version yesterday, he said, “On the night that I go back in time, you will be shot.” The rest of the sentence is cut out. And the phrase is even blanked out when the camera shows his words on the page. I couldn’t believe it. I found a couple of message board threads about it, and apparently that’s not the only 9/11-related cut.

Thank goodness for DVDs.

(By the way, whenever I see the phrase “bttf.com” I automatically think of “buttfuck.”)