And I feel like I should have something insightful to say. But I don’t like to think about it too much. I don’t offer any insights. Just to make myself think about it.
I remember thinking, when my boss at the time told me about the first plane, “That sucks. What a weird accident.” Then, at the other plane, “Oh, shit.” Then an alarmist person I worked with ran out of her office saying that there was smoke coming out of the Whitehouse and that the Pentagon was destroyed. I knew that my dad went there for meetings sometimes, so that scared me.
It all happened so fast that I can’t remember some parts of it.
I do remember what I wore that day. I still have that shirt and that tie.
I remember how hard it was to get a hold of my then-girlfriend on a cell phone and how that scared me. Because I had a two-hour train ride home or at least an hour and fifteen minutes to an hour and a half to her in Cambridge. I was afraid something would happen on the subway. In a tunnel. On the bridge she had to take or on the bridge we both had to take. I had my pocketknife ready the entire way home, as if a Leatherman would help anything.
I sat outside on the steps of Thomas Moore Hall at Boston College, smoking in disbelief, with my Nokia phone on the stone step beside me — a completely useless hunk of plastic that day. A couple of F-15s passed overhead, toward downtown Boston. And I realized that something was going to change.
I remember how my bosses acted around two in the afternoon when I finally got a hold of my then-girlfriend and asked them if it would be Okay if I left to go find her. They acted like I was crazy and paranoid. I knew then that my suspicions that they were tools was correct, proven when they outright fired me two months later for not being “corporate enough.”
I remember being scared, yes. But what I remember most was being sad. We watched the concert that aired that Friday night. When U2 came on, they started playing “Peace on Earth,” and I wanted them to stop because I knew I would cry. But they went into “Walk On” right away, which was both beautiful and brave. I still love that song.
A few weeks later, my parents and one of my brothers were up for a visit in Quincy. We were eating breakfast out one morning, and my dad got a phone call. We were at war. I had a sick feeling that this was only the start of something, like I bet a lot of us did.
Seven years later, I still don’t like to think about what happened, which I suppose makes me a coward. Whenever I am in a situation where I need to force myself to not laugh or to stop laughing, I think of people jumping and falling from the World Trade Center. That’s probably very sick. But it’s true. It makes me so sad that I can’t even smile for a while after thinking of that. Or maybe it’s a reminder that there are a lot of things we have no business ever smiling about. I don’t know. Maybe it’s when I feel guilty over situations where I shouldn’t be laughing, so I make myself picture things I can hardly bear.
Having family in the military, I get afraid when I think of what’s next — where else we might go to make people of a similar religion or skin color pay for what some crazy people did to us. We have our moral scruples in the methods we will choose to use in the mountains where the bad man probably is (war conventions/UN prohibitions) but then not when it comes to other nations, not even the same scruples with the United Nations.
It makes no sense. What we are doing, we are doing out of fear and hate. It’s not even all about oil or simple revenge. No matter who we elect in November.
