Before and After September 11th

The in-class 15-minute assignment was to write about how an event in your life changed things by creating a before and after image. I turned the story into my second personal narrative assignment for the class- so it includes what I came up with in those 15 minutes but it is like any other paper in that I ended up spending lots of time on it, incorporating previous work. 

My writing:

Before the September 11th attacks, I had never seen a building on fire with smoke billowing out. Before the attacks, my mother used to take the subway everywhere.

After the September 11th attacks, I saw what a building on fire looked like. After the attacks, my mother became afraid of bombs on the subways and started biking everywhere, no matter the weather.

Before, my dad made almost all his documentaries inside the United States. Before, my family was inseparable. After, he started making two and three month trips to the Middle East. After, my family was torn apart. My dad was missing from the picture all of a sudden. My parents love became strained and weak and the road to their divorce began.

Before, I didn’t have terrifying nightmares. After, I trembled at the sound of airplanes and reoccurring nightmares of planes hitting my building or buildings collapsing around me began.

Before, I didn’t know what Islamaphobia was. After, I saw a cab driver have his passport thrown in his face by police officers even though he did nothing to deserve it.

Before, Julia Madden’s uncle was alive and well. After, Julia Madden’s uncle was dead.

Before, I never cared much for politics. I had never attended a political rally. After, I was obsessed, and mostly angry. Angry that the Republican party and Bush administration were cheapening what had happened by exploiting it as an opportunity to invade Iraq, a country that had never once attacked Americans. I was disgusted that a political party was holding its convention in a place it was very unpopular only to milk the tragedy of September 11th to stir fear and promote warfare. I started to go to a lot of political rallies in New York after the attacks. At one rally, I saw a group of women whose husbands had died in the towers. They all had matching signs that read “Our grief is not a cry for war.” I could not have said it better myself.

Before the attacks, my mom had not been a grief consoler before. The neighborhood where she worked in Union Square was like what it is today, full of musicians and artists and farmers markets. In the weeks following the attacks, however, she grief counseled dozens, if not hundreds of people who had lost loved ones less than a mile away. The neighborhood was silent, full of cries and people hugging. It was not full of music or art. Trees, fences, benches and bulletin boards throughout Union Square park were all covered in Missing posters.

Before, I had never seen so much public agony. After, a little boy asked me if I had seen his big sister who worked in the North Tower.  It pained me to tell him but I had not. He moved on to the next person nearby. Everyone was going to give him the same answer until he realized his sister was gone for good. It wasn’t fair. She didn’t deserve to be gone for good.

It all began in school. Natasha, my teacher, has us all gather in the meeting area of our classroom for an announcement. She had heard from the radio in the lobby that a jet airliner had hit the world trade center. She said she was not sure of the details but they were getting word of a second plane. “Bad pilot”, I said. “No, Sam. This is an attack”.

“But nobody would want to attack us”, I replied.

“I wish that were true” she said.

Some of my friends began getting picked up from school. My mother and older brother arrived and I refused to leave. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay and hang out with my friends. The teachers were too depressed to teach. For the 10 year old me, that meant I could chat with friends and have fun.

My mom said she would take my hungry brother to get something to eat nearby, and then come back to pick me up. Lunch came around and I remember joking with friends about what had happened downtown in the lunch line. We made fun of the pilots for being stupid.

When my mother returned, she had heard about a plane crash outside Pittsburgh. My brother was worried about my grandfather who lives there. He told me I had to come home with them, and we left.

Before 9/11, I had never seen my brother so serious. He was 12- two years older than me. As it happened, his age difference was more obvious to me than it had ever been before. He knew more than me- he understood things I did not. He knew what terrorism was. He knew why they attacked New York City and why they wanted Americans dead.

Before the attacks, I had never heard the word terrorist.

My brother Nate knew that the buildings had collapsed by the time I was picked up and by the time we got home. I think he and my mother assumed that I knew this, too. All I knew was that a plane crashed into one of the twin towers. In the back of my mind, I still through it was nothing more than an accident.

My mom was able to contact my grandfather when we got home, which reassured by very worried brother. When we arrived in my living room, we turned on the TV.

Before the attacks, I had never seen Nickelodeon re-routed to be CNN. I had never seen every channel covering one event. The footage was on constant repeat- the buildings collapsed over and over again. I was shocked. I could not believe they were gone. It looked like war.

My babysitters son could not get into Queens, where he lived, because they closed the bridges. He could not call his mom because there was no cell phone service. So, my mom insisted that he sleep over at our house. He had only slept over for fun before. This was different. He had to. He was a best friend of my brother and I, only a year older than my brother Nate.

Nate was serious, but I have to admit, I was pretty excited after watching the buildings collapse. It is disturbing to me now, looking back. But destruction and death was foreign to me. I had never seen so many people so wrapped up in one thing. It shouldn’t have excited me, but it did. Jay T and I went to Central Park and stood on top of some benches atop a hill. We saw black smoke rising. I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself. My excitement was immature and ignorant, but intoxicating nonetheless.

The childlike thrill wore off the next morning. When I woke up and went out to the living room, it looked, outside the window, like it was snowing or something. I went up to the window and saw papers flying through the air and pieces of ash covering cars. There was smoke traveling through New York. I couldn’t believe it. I got serious, now. I knew what was going on was real- and I accepted for the first time that there were not just bad pilots in those planes. The New York Times devoted a massive headline to the event- “U.S ATTACKED”, the front page read. Inside, a picture of a man jumping. I was still mesmerized by the event, but no longer excited.

Later that day, my mom and I went to the local corner store to get some groceries. Everyone on the street was silent. There were missing posters on buildings. It was scary. I started to feel fear in a way I never had before.

Once planes were allowed in the air again, everyone would look up at them with unease. The whole city was in anticipation-mode. At night, I would lie in bed crying, terrified out of my mind when the booming sound of a low-flying plane bounced off the alleyway outside my room. I still have reoccurring nightmares about the day. Sometimes I am trying to get out of North Tower knowing it is about to collapse like I have come from the future. Sometimes I am in midtown running from collapsing buildings.

Writing about the experience has always helped me make sense of it all. To assess the effect it has had on my life, smaller than many in Manhattan. Over 422,000 people have been diagnosed with 9/11 related PTSD. 

The Hardest Month of My Life

Written for my Creative Non-Fiction Class 

It is in those moments of overwhelming agony that we begin to fear life itself. We begin to question its worth and its very meaning. We may not be able to get by if we cannot at least be hardend in our outlook when we are faced with situations at their worst.

And things can be there- at their worst. Freshman year of college, fourth block, and things were at their worst, at the worst possible time.

I was in a class that challenged me beyond belief. Not in what it the way it was making me think and not in the difficulty of it all- just in the sheer quantity. Eight hours of class every day. From 9am to noon with a 30 minute break for lunch. Then 12:30 to 3 or 4. Then we would meet again at night, at 7 or 8pm and our meetings would last until 10 or 11pm. As for homework, it three essays a night, each two to three pages in length. 50 to 150 pages of reading. Every other night we would have to make a long power point. There was no missing class, as everything we wrote about revolved around seeing films and reviewing them. The class was Russian Woman in Film. The professor was visiting from Moscow and was intent on giving American students perspective that let them see what hard work looked like. In Russia, she said, "We work hard and never complain."

The pictures the class painted of Russia were beyond bleak. Depressing rates of prostitution and alcoholism matched with freezing weather, grey skies and unworldly isolation. "I never want to go to Russia", students would say at night classes the professor did not attend. "It sounds miserable, like hell on earth". The films displayed this best, and we watched at least two every day. Some about murder, some about robbery, some about the collapse of trust in politics, about abandonment, about the poverty of the average family...and always with a terribly sad ending. I had never seen so many unsettling and upsetting movies in such a short period of time.

So, I met the demands of the class as best I could, pulling all nighters, some back to back. Sleep deprivation, mixed with caffeine to keep it going, is a very ugly thing. It drains you of purpose and if you are only doing it to do your homework, your homework suffers. And when you are being hard on yourself, if your homework suffers, you suffer.

When you have no life in your bones given to you by sleep and you are depending on the life in your muscles given to you by energy drinks and caffeine pills, you can get very, very sick. Nose bleeds and vomit. Loss of appetite and bad vision. I had never been through this before, but I didn't see much of a choice. I had to pass this class, as hard as it was. I was a freshman, a perfectionist, and I knew I could do it.

The challenges and dramatic perils of taking "Russian Women in Film" came at a time when my father was in Haiti covering the catastrophic damage of one of mankind's most devastating earthquakes.

Because of the power outages in Port-Au-Prince, we lost contact with my father. Stories of looting, homicides and a incredible lack of resources were dominating the news. The city was a ruin and a hub for crime at it's worst in one of the most dangerous places on earth. A week went by without word from my dad. Nobody in his office in New York had heard from him and none of my emails or texts received reply. I knew that without power he could not charge his phone or computer, but I felt the need to be reassured. With little sleep and loads of stress, the feeling that my father was "missing" in the middle of hell on earth could not have hit me harder.

FRONTLINE had assigned my father to create a documentary on the earthquake. But, when he arrived in Port-Au-Prince to begin work on his documentary, PBS took notice in a way they don't typically. He was the only correspondent there, thus more than just an employee working on a film. PBS News Hour wanted him on TV. They were going to interview him about the situation on the ground. Finally, I would have an idea of what was going on. He was alive and well and ready for TV, or so I thought.

I had never seen him look worse. Scratchy voice, sunburnt neck, dirty face. He described a situation I was unprepared to hear about. He had seen babies dehydrate to death, dozens of bodies being picked up by bulldozers, amputations preformed without anesthetic, thousands of people trying to stay safe in a new world of homelessness dominated by rape, theft and warfare. He'd covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, seen guerilla battles firsthand in Nicaragua. He was in New York to cover the horrors of September 11th, in Guatemala to cover drug wars, in New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and in Saudi Arabia to cover public beheadings and mistreatment of women. "I have never seen anything even close this bad in my decades of directing" he said on national television. Conflict zones, terrorism and battlefield journalism, where he had risked his life and survived near death experiences too many times to count didn't measure up to what he was going through now.

It truly was hell on earth. After a brief wave of power hit his hotel, I got an email. His tone was no better than it was on the TV- he was going through something nobody should and yet he was the lucky one. He had food and shelter, he had privilege. He was struck with an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness and piercing sense of hopelessness.

"How could he ever recover?", I thought. And how am I to focus on a class that requires all the focus I can provide when all I can think about is my Dad.

So, one would hope that the story resolved itself from there, that my Dad returned to the States and began to recover and I came out of the class and entered winter break ready to see him and get some sleep! But, no. When shit is bad, it's really bad.

My cousin, who I was inseparably close with as I spent lots of time with him every summer and every winter, had been diagnosed with Crohn's disease. His medicine was not working and he was losing weight off his already skinny body very rapidly. The doctors, having taken dangerously long to finally diagnos him, where now struggling to find a cure that worked. His body was rejecting his medicine and vomiting everything he ate. He was becoming increasingly malnourished and his stomach was extending like that of a famished toddler in National Geographic. He looked like one of those photos that shocked the world. We were hanging on and hoping for a miracle.

Henry was his name. And I was his biggest role model. I meant the world to him, and as this was happening, he meant the world to me. I had to miss class to speak to him on the phone. His optimism brought me to tears. I had agreed to visit him in Vermont over winter break, a week I ended up helping his mother take care of him so she could go to work.

They finally found a drug that worked. His healing process could begin. Of course, the medicine dramatically increased his chances of getting cancer later in life, but they had to risk it.

You may think, it can't get any worse for me the people close to me.  Well, I won't elaborate more than I want to, but my best friend at the time had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and she was losing her mind- saying things over the phone that made no sense, rehashing memories with which she could hurt me with, saying the meanest things imaginable. When she heard news of my cousin, she told me we were killing him with medicine. About a month later, I had to cut her out of my life for good. But I cannot deny how much more painful she made the whole experience. Her words stuck with me, they pierced my heart. Messages of homophobia, of bigotry, of judgement, of hate. She charged that I was a confused and deranged person. She charged that Haiti was getting what they deserved because they practiced voodoo. She called all our friends names and was eventually on her own.

So, looking back on this time- a time so bad it brought me to the worst state I had ever been in, I am grateful it was as short-lived as a block. I am still somewhat sensitive about all of it. The string of circumstances that made the experience so hellish drove me into the ground. I considered ending my life one night, thinking I just could not take it all anymore. That way of thinking never went far. Some sleep did me well when I needed it most. But, it was what it was, and it was ugly.

I think, now, understanding that life can be horrific, and will likely be even worse at some future point down the road, I am more prepared for things at their worst. I can survive the worst of the worst. I have to.

If I did it then, I can do it again.

My 9/11 Story

From my family research history paper.

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 11^th, 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 6^th 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 8^th 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 11^th 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 7^th and 8^th 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.

A Summary of My Thoughts on the 10-Year Anniversary of 9/11

I continue to work on my short-subject documentary on 9/11 and take time to personally reflect on the effect the day had on me, my family and friends. I take some time off before returning back to Colorado to do so. Please read this if you get a chance, it would mean alot to me.

I'll never forget 9/11 & the days after. How dust filled the streets, how missing posters covered every wall. How people cheered in the streets for firefighters & police officers. How despite all the unity, muslims were vilified. How the government exploited our city's sorrow to stir fear & win votes. But most of all, I will never forget what was lost. Not just the lives, but the structures. I loved being around the Twin Towers & looking at them from the Staten Island ferry. While not all my memories are of togetherness, some of racist hate and some of ignorance, I believe we should all try to remember the simple 'human loss side of things' (I can't think of a better way to put it) - those who just went to work that day and did not come back & those who went to work sacrificing their health and too often their lives to save others. May they never be forgotten, no matter how many years separate us from the tragedy.

In New York it is everywhere right now, a constant reminder from every newspaper, magazine, tv station and street eavesdropping that the mighty 10 year anniversary has arrived. Everyone has their personal connection, puny or huge, usually very fluctuating. For me, I think it is important to reconigize that no matter how you feel about the country now and how you feel about the political aftermath, 9/11 was an event of mass proportions, the deadliest day in U.S history. I feel like the human side is lost in the shuffle of our generation's frustrations with our bureaucratic two-party mess, the political theater that was made of 9/11 in such a cheesy fashion and our contentious & deadly conflicts in the Mid East. Today, I'm going to try my best to only think of 9/11 as a loss of human life on a large scale, and for that alone, leaving behind the ugly & cold partisanship to let ourselves think, we can unite in memorium.

Today and tonight or whenever it feels right , I ask that we each pay tribute, even if we can only do so internally, to the near 3,000 civilians who perished, the tens of thousands of family and friends who were left with trauma & emptiness, those who suffered from often suicide-enducing PTSD and those who were made sick by the toxic air. To these people, from all the nationalities, countries, genders and economic backgrounds they hailed. Let us never forget them.