How to remember 9/11

I am not really a fan of the anniversary of 9/11. There is so much emphasis on remembering, remembering, never forgetting, as people such as President Donald Trump wax on about their brave contributions and how close they came to death. If you were actually there, it is a pretty unpleasant memory.

I was more or less underneath the World Trade Center, two blocks away on the uptown 4 train, when the towers collapsed. I would not really understand they had done so for a number of hours, once I had walked miles out of Ground Zero and finally got a cell signal. It was not a good day, although the toll for me was nonexistent compared to that of people who lost family members, in the most sick and brutal way possible. On that crowded train, which slammed to a halt when the impact hit and then slowly filled with toxic smoke and dust from the pulverized towers, it occurred to me that I might die. But I was lucky, and I didn’t.

After perhaps 45 terrifying minutes, eased by two warm office-manager-type women passengers keeping everyone’s panic in check, the conductor* overrode the emergency brake and reversed the train to pull the hindmost door into the northernmost part of the Wall Street station, and we all filed out into a total whiteout of ash. Someone waved us into the lobby of a huge building, where I stayed for an hour or so, in shock and speaking to no one, until the haze cleared enough to see a bit of blue sky. Then I walked to the Alphabet City dump of an apartment where I was subletting a room, gathered all the belongings I could carry, and caught the F train to Brooklyn to sleep on a friend’s floor. In the morning, I persuaded him to drive back to our hometown near Boston, where I took shelter at my parents’ house, numbly watching CNN till 2 in the morning. Despite everything, I decided to return to New York, where I had moved just a few months earlier, and accepted a job I had been about to turn down. I found a better room in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood I still think of as home.

But the city was deeply traumatized. Thousands of families and workplaces were in mourning, camouflaged men with guns filled the subway stations, and it seemed to be months before anyone laughed. When the wind blew east, you could smell the destruction even on my street.

A primary political awakening for me was to see the events of that day twisted, rapidly and cynically, to other people’s ends. It was particularly galling to see the attack used to devastate the civilians of an uninvolved country, as the Bush administration set about bamboozling Americans into thinking Iraq was somehow responsible. I marched against that war, along with tons of other New Yorkers—not out of any love for Saddam Hussein, but because it was incomprehensible that we we were being used as cover to send our vulnerable young troops to kill and displace millions of regular Iraqis. No one cared what we thought. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and their crew felt like having a war, and a war was had. Americans miles from New York and Washington put patriotic World Trade Center bumper stickers on their cars and, three years later, reelected Bush to office.

Though I myself may not want to dwell on or in the events of that day, I’m not saying we should forget 9/11. The question is, remember it to what end? Is the point maudlin self-aggrandizement of the kind Trump specializes in, or excuses to attack others? Or can the memory be turned toward something actually useful to us as people, as a country?

The 25^th anniversary of the attack, which we commemorate this week, has seen erstwhile “America’s mayor” Rudy Giuliani using 9/11 as a prop for bigotry against New York City’s empathetic, funny, problem-solving current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who was a nine-year-old Manhattan schoolkid when 9/11 happened and who (like the terrorists! OMG) happens to be Muslim. Mamdani, meanwhile, directed his administration to release 170,000 pages of documents, searchable via a public digital portal, that establish that government told New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe after 9/11 while knowing it was not. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said in a press conference. In response to a reporter’s question, he declined to focus on Giuliani’s role in the misinformation: “I think the focus of memorial services should be on the New Yorkers who were killed that day, their families, the survivors, the first responders. I don’t think it should be on politicians.”

As Mamdani indicated, those consequences are still unfolding for survivors right now. The Washington Post wrote on Wednesday that “the number of 9/11 survivors who are receiving aid for cancer has roughly tripled over the last five years,” based on an analysis of reports from the World Trade Center Health Program. And that’s for those who are still with us. In Brooklyn yesterday, a friend of a friend mentioned that a relative, an NYPD officer who was stationed at Ground Zero in the days after the event, died of cancer years ago. Many first responders, survivors, and local residents did not make it to the release of these files—which, the New York Times rather astonishingly reports, “were stored in 68 boxes in a city office, shielded from public view for more than two decades and, according to city officials, discovered only last year.”

Hillary Clinton, writing in the Atlantic this week, writes that the focus of remembering should be on “what the long tail of 9/11 has taught us: Policy must be about people. Americans who need help don’t care about ideology or who gets credit. They care whether government delivers results.” It’s hard to argue with that, and her essay captures what it was like to have been one of New York’s US senators at the time of this unprecedented disaster, doggedly trying to shore up support for the city. But her piece also points to how much 9/11 becomes a mirror for whatever policies people believe in already. In Trump, Clinton sees a man who doesn’t understand the lessons of that day, ignoring both the facts and the responsibility of elected officials to improve their constituents’ lives. To Trump, who garnered headlines in 2015 with racist inventions about American Muslims celebrating 9/11, the day is no doubt just one more argument for barring all foreigners but white South Africans from the country.  

In the end, I defer to people for whom the losses of that day are not symbolic but literal, and who have an even stronger instinct to turn away than I do. My former Boston Globe colleague David Filipov lost his father, Al Filipov, on one of the hijacked planes. “I envy other people’s ability to turn on and turn off their sensitivity to the inescapable barrage,” he wrote about the anniversary in 2011. “And it boils down to this. Every time I see that grainy image of AA11 exploding against the tower, every time I see the thick plumes streaming from the skyscrapers like giant, malevolent balloons, I am watching my dad’s violent death. I do not know how many times I have to see it, but I know I have seen it hundreds of times. And there does not seem to be a way to avoid seeing it, or hearing about it.” Amid all the exhausting misuses of 9/11, and the grim political implications that are still emerging, this anniversary above all should be about the people still grieving a beloved human, and about the lives that continue to be lost prematurely, even today.

* Postscript: In the process of fact-checking this story, I discovered that the resourceful operator of the uptown 4 train I was on that day was Kevin Harrington, an Irish-American Sikh convert from Queens, and came across this TV interview with him I had never seen before. A few years after 9/11, he was ordered by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to exchange his turban for an MTA hat or take a job out of sight of the public, and responded by filing a lawsuit. The parties reached a settlement, and as of 2012, the Center for Constitutional Rights reported, “Sikhs will be allowed to wear their turbans on the job without a corporate logo attached, with the only requirement being that the color of the turban must be blue (consistent with the MTA uniform).” Only in New York. 

Are you familiar with the cat distribution system? It’s that thing where the universe decides to distribute you a cat. Last Friday evening we were driving from Washington to New York and were still only in southern Maryland when one of our kids needed to use the bathroom. At the rest stop where we pulled over, we found a gorgeous, stripey, yellow-eyed young cat sitting next to a shed at the edge of the woods. She was rail thin, curious, and very friendly. It seemed unthinkable to just drive away. Within a few minutes, we had made the decision to stick her in the car, stop at the mall for supplies, and schedule a vet appointment.

Anyway, meet Stripes. We have not yet introduced her to our large, dominant solo cat, who does not approve of this folly in any way, but we’re working on it. Stripes has already done her first podcast and is settling in. Thank you to the cat distribution system for gracing us with this beauty. As systems go, it’s a little haphazard, but it works.

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