Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
Where were you on September 11th?
I kept the rough edges, the anger, the dark humor, and the conversational rhythm. I cleaned repetition, tightened chronology, and added only a light Mark Twain-like bite.
Where were you on September 11th?
Well, let me tell you where I was.
I was taking my 85-year-old mom to her first day at an assisted living facility.
My mom had been suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s, and it had gotten worse and worse and worse. It finally got to the point where she simply couldn’t stay at home anymore. She would wake up in the middle of the night screaming. She would run out the door naked. You never knew what was going to happen next.
My wife told me something that turned out to be very wise.
She said, “You know, your mom’s going to kill you. You’re going to die before she does.”
And she was probably right. There comes a point where love and exhaustion start fighting each other, and exhaustion usually has more stamina.
So I finally realized it was time. I made the arrangements.
And on the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was taking my mother to a nursing home.
It was a very, very rough thing to be doing.
We got there early in the morning. My mom was all dressed up. Everybody was trying to make it feel like a normal day.
They had a big television where everybody gathered around, and on the television there was a building on fire.
Well, I had seen buildings on fire before.
New York had been hit by airplanes before. The Empire State Building had been hit by an airplane decades earlier. Strange things happen.
But this looked different. And I knew something else.
It is actually kind of difficult to accidentally fly an airplane directly into one of the World Trade Center towers.
I knew that for a ridiculous reason. When I was younger, one of the things we used to do with Flight Simulators was deliberately crash airplanes into buildings. It was a video game. We knew it was a video game. Nobody was advocating mass murder. We were kids screwing around with a computer.
But you learned something doing it. You had to aim at the damn building. You had to go out of your way to hit it.
Those towers were not sitting in the middle of some normal flight path where pilots routinely had to dodge them.
Still, my mind was somewhere else. My mother was going into assisted living. My family was dealing with dementia. Terrorism was not exactly at the top of my agenda that morning.
So the first airplane hits, and everybody is trying to figure out what happened.
Then the second airplane hits. Wait a minute. This is not right. This is not normal.
Two airplanes do not accidentally fly into two buildings seventeen minutes apart.
The odds of that are somewhere between winning the lottery twice and being struck by lightning while cashing the ticket.
Something very bad was happening.
Shortly afterward, my wife calls me.
She says, “Did you see the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center?”
I said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Then she says, “Oh, by the way, I locked myself out of the car.”
And there you have September 11th in miniature.
The world is apparently ending, New York is under attack, nobody knows what the hell is happening, and somebody still manages to lock themselves out of the car.
Life has a strange sense of timing. So I had to go help my wife get back into the car.
And while I’m driving around, the reports are coming over the radio.
Another airplane. The Pentagon.
What the hell is going on? Nobody knew yet.
Nobody was standing around saying, “Oh yes, obviously this is Al-Qaeda.”
Nobody had connected all the dots. And of all people, maybe I should have.
I knew who Bin Laden was. I knew the threat existed.
Several months before September 11th, I had been in Somalia and other places involved, in my own small way, in efforts that might create opportunities to locate people like Bin Laden. Finding Bin Laden himself was certainly not in my pay grade, but the United States government knew who he was.
We knew there were people out there who hated us. We knew terrorism existed.
We knew about the earlier World Trade Center bombing. But knowing something intellectually and seeing two airplanes slam into skyscrapers are two completely different things.
And besides, that morning my mind was elsewhere.
Then September 11th became personal in another way.
I worked very closely with a company located in the World Trade Center. I knew at least ten people there. Everybody died except one person. The CEO happened to be on an airplane traveling. Everybody else died. The receptionist. The managers.
The people I talked to. The people I worked with. People who had gone to work that morning expecting an ordinary Tuesday.
They were just gone. And I haven’t been back to New York City since.
I have never gone to see the World Trade Center Memorial.
Twenty-five years later, it is still hard.
And September 11th did not stop killing people on September 11th.
People died years later from illnesses connected to what they breathed in that day and during the cleanup afterward.
Firefighters. Police officers. Construction workers. Residents. Office workers.
People digging through that mountain of dust and steel looking for bodies and pieces of bodies.
God only knows exactly what was floating around in that cloud.
And then there was the psychological damage.
Families lost husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.
Some people watched other human beings jump from buildings because burning alive was worse than falling a thousand feet.
You do not simply shrug that off. Trauma kills too. Sometimes it just takes longer.
But September 11th killed something else. America lost some of its innocence.
Before September 11th, we knew there were dangerous people in the world, but many Americans still had the comfortable belief that all of that insanity happened somewhere else.
Religious fanatics happened somewhere else. People blowing themselves up happened somewhere else. America was protected by two oceans, the greatest military in the world, and a rather impressive capacity for assuming everything would probably turn out fine.
We didn’t check all the back doors. We certainly weren’t checking the virtual ones.
People could come into the United States, live among us, attend flight schools, learn how to operate aircraft, move around the country, make preparations, and almost nobody thought twice about it.
Some of them were living right here in Florida. There was no Department of Homeland Security. There was no Patriot Act. There wasn’t surveillance and security everywhere the way there would be afterward. Airports were different. Borders were different. Intelligence sharing was different.
The whole mentality was different. Then September 11th happened.
Afterward, the gloves came off.
Afghanistan. The hunt for Bin Laden. The Patriot Act. Massive expansion of surveillance. Airport security. Wars. Intelligence operations. Two decades of consequences.
In some ways, and people hate hearing this, Bin Laden won something.
No, he did not defeat the United States.
No terrorist organization was going to plant a flag on Washington and declare victory.
But look at what one morning accomplished.
He changed America. He helped drag the United States into wars costing trillions of dollars. Thousands of American soldiers died. Far more people died overseas.
Governments fell. Countries were destabilized. Surveillance expanded. Fear expanded.
Political divisions expanded. The world changed.
If one of your goals is to force your enemy to spend enormous amounts of blood, money and attention responding to you, then unfortunately you have to admit that part of the strategy worked.
Several years before September 11th, the United States had opportunities to go after Bin Laden.
There were debates about intelligence, legality and collateral damage.
Do you kill one terrorist if doing so also kills dozens of innocent people nearby?
Before September 11th, those decisions looked one way. After September 11th, they looked very different.
September 11th taught America that evil was not theoretical.
It was not something safely contained in history books.
It was not something that only happened in foreign countries with names Americans had trouble pronouncing.
There were people willing to kill thousands of strangers simply because those strangers represented something they hated.
The victims did not vote on Middle Eastern policy. The receptionist did not invade anybody. The guy making coffee on the 80th floor was not conducting foreign policy. The passengers on the airplanes were not soldiers.
They were simply people.
And they were murdered because murdering them served somebody’s cause.
That is what terrorism is.
And that is why I get irritated when, twenty-five years later, people act as though the lesson has somehow expired.
The problem is not every Muslim. It is not every person who believes in Islam.
People are entitled to their religion. Christians believe things other people think are crazy.
Jews believe things other people think are crazy.
Muslims believe things other people think are crazy.
Atheists think all of them are crazy.
Welcome to humanity.
The problem is radicalized people who turn belief into permission to murder.
The problem is Islamist extremism when it produces movements that believe God has given them permission to slaughter strangers.
Pretending that ideology does not exist is just as foolish as pretending every Muslim believes it.
Both ideas are stupid. There are people in the world who hate America.
Some hate us because of religion. Some because of politics. Some because of communism. Some because of nationalism. Some because we are wealthy.
Some because we are powerful. Some because they think we interfere with the rest of the world.
Some probably hate us simply because hating somebody gives them something to do before lunch.
But they exist.
And being an American means understanding that.
Freedom does not mean stupidity. Tolerance does not require blindness.
You can respect somebody’s religion without pretending extremists do not exist.
You can welcome immigrants without throwing away the locks.
You can believe in civil liberties while still understanding that somebody occasionally wants to blow up the building those liberties are being discussed in.
That is the balance. September 11th should have taught us that. Maybe we have forgotten some of it.
So on this anniversary, remember where you were on September 11th, if you are old enough to remember it.
Remember the thousands of people who died that day.
Remember the thousands more whose lives were shortened or destroyed afterward.
Remember the husbands and wives who never came home.
Remember the children who grew up without parents.
Remember the firefighters and police officers walking into buildings while everybody else was running out.
Remember the people who fought wars afterward.
Remember the families they left behind.
Remember how much of the world we live in today traces back to that one Tuesday morning.
And remember it when you vote.
I am not telling you to vote against Muslims. I am not telling you to vote against Islam.
I am telling you to vote like somebody who understands that the world is not always a nice place. Vote like somebody who remembers that countries have enemies.
Vote like somebody who remembers that evil occasionally puts on a suit, buys an airline ticket, goes to school, rents an apartment and waits patiently for Tuesday morning.
There are people in this world who would not lose much sleep if America disappeared tomorrow.
That does not mean we should live frightened. It means we should live awake.
So on September 11th, have a beer. Have a glass of red wine.
Raise it to somebody who did not make it home.
Think about where you were. Think about who you were.
Think about the country we were before that morning.
And remember: We are not as innocent as we used to be.
Maybe we never should have been.
I deliberately kept the provocation in it rather than turning it into a conventional memorial essay. The primary editing was structure and rhythm, not sanding down the argument.
