Ten years later…
How unreal it seems, to be marking this anniversary of the day that touched and forever changed us in the Western world. How can it be that 10 years have gone by already?
I can very clearly remember where I was that Tuesday morning. I was at home writing, as I usually did in the mornings before I went to work. The Today Show was going on but I’d put the TV on mute. At some point I glanced up and noticed NBC had cut into its feed to bring breaking news. Thick black smoke billowing into the air from what seemed to be a gaping hole in the side of a familiar-looking high-rise. It quickly dawned on me why the building, with its signature phallic symbol, seemed so familiar. I’d returned, a few days before, from vacationing in New York and one of the last things I’d done there was have dinner with friends in Chinatown before traipsing off to do the touristy sightseeing thing at the Twin Towers. Of course, what I was witnessing now on my TV, I would come to find out, was the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, as they were occurring, in real time.
Surely it must have been some sort of accident, was my first reaction, even as the smoke billowed skyward. Which reflects the relative innocence of the times back then. The concept of a terrorist attack was so murky, so hazy in my mind. Some pilot went off-course, I was convinced. A simple mistake. The American newscasters were tittering for nothing, soon regular scheduling would be resumed. But, as we know now, nothing regular would surface for some time. I watched with horror and disbelief as another plane headed for the other tower which, when hit, belched a ball of fire. Even as that was going on, there were reports coming in that other such attacks had happened at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania.
It seems almost funny now when I think about it, how terrified I felt watching all that madness transpire. It felt like the Apocalypse. These events were happening in another land; not my own.
And yet.
If America sneezes, we in Jamaica catch a cold. At no other time did this axiom seem truer. When I’d collected myself sufficiently to venture out to my office, I practically ran to my car, furtively watching the skies for signs of planes careening out of control, sci-fi style. Even then, I didn’t truly comprehend the concept of terrorism, the attack on freedom by, to use George W Bush’s term, a “faceless coward”. Until then, it had been a mere abstraction. Mind you, I’d come of age in an era when the IRA had been most volatile, and yet, I never had a real sense of the horror of violence so unrelenting, and in a sense so inescapable, because of its randomness, its ability to replicate itself. (The Christmas bombing of Harrods in 1983 comes to mind, in which six people were killed. And let’s not forget, two bombs in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park the year before, during which 11 members of the Household Cavalry and Royal Green Jackets were killed, along with seven horses. The list goes on.) Living in a country such as Jamaica, dubbed crime capital of the world, you can, to some extent, have control over your personal safety. To some extent.
But having just watched the Great Superpower of the North so haplessly attacked, I was shaken. It meant everybody was vulnerable.
I remember talking with Wayne Brown that Saturday morning during a workshop. He was struggling to make sense of it, what it would mean for how we lived from here on out. I was prepared to put the whole ugly, sordid incident in my rear-view mirror, relegate it to the past where it, like all the bad things I didn’t want to think about, belonged. But Wayne kept grimly saying one thing: nothing will ever be the same again.
He, as usual, was right.
Innocence lost can never be recaptured. When I think about how blasé I was before the September attacks. How spoiled I was, living in a paradise I was only vaguely aware of. In 2001, I was incapable of imagining such an act of evil perpetrated on innocent people. For the following week, or however long that I kept glued to coverage, I kept waiting for the reason for this premeditated mass murder to reveal itself. It never came. Today, however, a car engine backfiring can sound a death knell for me – the deadbolt Law & Order ‘doink doink’ sound is a constant soundtrack in my head – and there is treachery at every turn, where often none realistically exists. And I’m not alone in that. Look at the little humiliations we’re subjected to at airports now. Foreigners, once exotic, are simply strangers to be regarded with suspicion. Xenophobia is practically invited to sit around the banquet table and vulgarly lick its chops, no apologies needed.
Just an ordinary Tuesday morning, that September morning. Ordinary coffee with ordinary toast as I sat down to do the ordinary work every writer must do to become better at the craft. Those Americans directly touched by the events of that day, too, were just going about their ordinary business. Which is perhaps the greatest lesson of those attacks: the banality of evil. The way the unthinkable can – and often does – occur without calling attention to itself. It could happen again.