While everything up until this point holds tremendous and massive historical significance, I cannot help but feel the need to make things both up-to-date and personally relevant. So, there is no better place to begin my American story than with the events of September the 11th, 2001.
I have lived in the worldwide capital of commerce, film, publishing, fashion and diversity since the age of three. While New Yorkers have garnered a bad reputation for sheltering themselves to the confines of two or three of the city’s five boroughs, I consider myself a fortunately well-traveled individual, having been on several airplanes leaving and entering New York. I have always had friends in all five boroughs as well as friends in Westchester, New Jersey and Connecticut. So, when approaching the events of 9/11, I like to think of myself as someone who understands a diverse array of perspectives from people who live, work or hang out in the city. That time in our nation’s history cannot simply be molded into a sense of heroic unity, nor can it be demeaned into a generalization of Islamaphobia. There was far, far more than one or the other going on in the Big Apple.
On the day of the event, I was 10 years old. The first day of 6th grade had just taken place the day before. I was still so excited to see everyone at school. It was just 16 minutes into the school day when the first plane hit. My teachers had left the room during morning meeting. We were all having too much fun socializing to make anything of it. When they came back, they were mumbling to themselves. They told us to be silent and listen. They said the doorman in the lobby of the school had heard on the radio that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. My friend Julia Madden, whose uncle worked in the North Tower, began to cry. I rebuffed back- “So it was an accident. Some dumb pilots”. I was terribly confused. Not only did I not understand what terrorism was or why anyone would want to kill innocent people, but I did not have an understanding of the event itself for a long while. The day went on, with parents coming in to pick up their kids. My mom came and picked up my older brother, taking him out to lunch, as I insisted to have lunch with my friends. My brother is 2 years older than me. I remember joking in the lunch line with my friend Matthew about how dumb the pilots were. We were both under the impression that two planes had hit one another and then fell onto the World Trade Center. It thought they were two small planes and a couple people were killed. I was even more confused when my mom came back to pick me up more insistently, what was going on. She was in panic over some plane crash in Pittsburgh (Flight 93). That’s where my grandfather and his wife live. I started to notice, as we were leaving the building and trying to get home, that people around us were crying. I think both my mom and my brother knew at that point that the buildings had collapsed. My brother and I went to the living room when we got home. We turned on the TV to watch cartoons or see what was available. Every channel was the same thing- even Nickelodeon. I saw footage of the buildings collapsing. I panicked and ran to my mom, who was still frantic about the flight in Pittsburgh, trying to no avail to get her cell phone to let her call her dad. Her panic calmed down when the news confirmed that the flight had crashed and did not make it close to the city of Pittsburgh or what many were speculating to be its target, the White House.
While the gravity of the event overwhelmed me from that point on- seeing debris float through Manhattan, smoke rise from downtown, seeing images of people jumping from the towers in the New York Times, reading the headline “Those Bastards” in the Village Voice…etc, I don’t think the magnitude of the event hit me until about a week later. My mother works as a doctor in Union Square, just a mile away from where the towers stood. She took me to work with her on the first or second Saturday after 9/11 for a walk through Union Square Park. It was pretty incredibly quiet in the park despite the large amount of people. Typically, the park is full of music, high spirits and lots of spunk. This day, it was home only to the sound of cries and gasps. The entire place was covered in posters. Fences, benches, boards and trees, all covered. Thousands of posters of men, women, babies, children, even an occasional dog or cat. All of them read the same piercing word- “MISSING”. Every once in awhile you would see one you saw before, or someone would come up to you asking if you had seen this person, or this person. I remember wanting to say yes but knowing that would have been bad. My mom held my hand tight. I could tell she was fighting back tears.
A month or so after the attacks, I was taking a cab to school and the driver was pulled over by NPYD officers. The first thing the officers asked my cabdriver was where he was from. He said he was from Russia, but they continued to ask him in a more and more intimidating voice what nation he came from. He kept on replying, with fear in his voice, that he was from Russia. After demanding his license and registration, they gave him a ticket and threw it onto his lap. He had caused no damage to any cars on the street and did not commit any crime- I was in the backseat and I am sure of this. The cops eventually walked away mumbling as my cab driver began to get emotional. As we drove, he explained to me that if he had told them where he was really from, Afghanistan, they would have arrested him. His English was not well, but I remember him saying “Al Queda and Arabs are not the same thing. Al Queda kills Arabs. Arabs worked in those buildings.” He was shaking his head in agitation for the remainder of the ride. I remember feeling bad for him and coming to an understanding, around that time period, that racial profiling was taking place on a wide scale. Sure, we all cheered in the streets when cop cars or firefighters drove by. There is no question we were united in support of the heroes of that day and that can never be taken away from us. But, we were not the united city many in the media painted us out to be. Violent hate crimes against Arab and Muslim Americans soared after 9/11. Innocent people were having to face the blame for an event they had absolutely nothing to do with. My 8th grade teacher, Ali came to class one day yelling in fury over the fact that hate crimes were still going on three years later. I also remember my mother being disgusted at the level of Islamaphobia throughout New York- something we see today in the phony “Ground Zero Mosque” debate. (Phony because it is not a mosque and it is not even close to ground zero).
I remember watching a Bruce Springsteen concert on TV. It was about a year after the attacks. He was performing in front of a sold out crowd in Barcelona. When he sang his heart out in “The Rising”, the crowd roared the lyrics in unity. It was as if they were sending New York and America a message- we feel your pain, we are here for you. The world was united at that moment, I remember thinking. I also remember seeing, just a couple years back, images of people in Palestine, radically anti-American and Anti-Israeli women and children, laughing at and celebrating the 9/11 attacks. The footage was said to be recorded on the day of 9/11. The translation on the news depicted the people as shouting slogans like “Death to America” and “Let the Americans Burn”. It disturbed, angered and repulsed me. I don’t know if I can ever think of 9/11 simply as a day of international unity. In my view, it represented a day in which people picked a side- the side of grief and sympathy or the side of celebration, the side of evil.
I am currently working on a documentary about September 11th for Colorado College’s Film Fest. Something that stuck out to me from one of my interviews came from my friend Marleana. She spoke about her dad, who told just prior to 9/11 that her generation was the first in American history to grow up without something to fear. I thought about this. It brought me to tears, as I recollected a period of my life I had shut out for so long: a post-9/11 fear that dominated my subconscious. I remember looking outside the windows of my classroom in 7th and 8th grades, thinking about what it would be like to have the building struck by a plane. It still seemed probable that the city would be bombed, even two years after the event. I also remember hearing airplanes go by, and almost every time I would hold my breath- thinking my life could soon come to an abrupt end. A paralyzing sense of terror would overtake my body. I would lie in bed crying some nights, terrified out of my mind when the booming sound of a low-flying plane bounced off the alleyway outside my room.
Nowadays, it is very rare that I become frightened by the sound of an airplane. I tend not to notice when planes fly low in the sky. I do not fear boarding them and very rarely feel uncomfortable on board. Things have changed and I feel safe again. I don’t ever want to go back to that fear. It brought nothing good to me. It brought nothing good to any of us- in New York or anywhere in the world. Fear brought us towards racial profiling, towards warfare, towards the death and destruction of civilian life. Living in fear of terror or warfare is no way to live at all. Fear spreads like disease causing populations to act out against other populations of people they wrongfully deem to be threat. When America invaded Iraq and killed thousands of people who had never once done anything to us before, we did not quell fears at home. We simply spread fear into Iraq, causing those who we bombed to fear us, while at the same time allowing our military to fear retaliation. This cycle of fear was beyond unhealthy. It was an immoral response to the attacks in New York and D.C. It was downright criminal.
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