Have We Had Enough of 9/11Yet?

The morning of 9/11, I was working as a coding instructor for a litigation support company at 39 Broadway, corner of Exchange Place, two blocks from the World Trade Center.

Before going to work I had gone to vote in the Democratic primary. My polling place was the grammar school located at Eighty-First Street and Madison Avenue, where I came face-to-face with Michael Bloomberg, who was being trailed by an entourage of TV cameramen. Considering him to be the latest of rich Republican nut-jobs in the manner of Ronald Lauder and having nothing to do with me, I did not even offer him my hand. (I have since calibrated my opinion of him according to the circumstances) Sensing my reticence, he just offered me a polite nod and continued past, his entourage floating by me in his wake.

When the attacks occurred and the towers collapsed, the decorum in my office collapsed into pandemonium. People ran around frantically, some crawling under their desks, women screaming “We’re all going to die!” Presently, everybody calmed down to a state of fragile alarm and waited for the dust outside to settle. This took a couple of hours.

Since a large part of my job had to do with cases involving exposure to asbestos, I understood that the air outside was charged with a lethal quantity of asbestos and fiberglass dust, I wrapped my face in several layers of wet towels, and as most of my co-workers made their way the short distance to the Staten Island Ferry, I started up in the opposite direction north on Broadway, toward my home on the Upper East Side.

The layer of lethal dust and debris on the street was several inches thick and my clothes were covered with the ghastly substance.

When I got to Wall Street I turned east. The street was completely deserted except for a lone policeman at the corner of Wall and Nassau Streets, forlornly manning a barricade though the streets were deserted except for myself and the other occasional stragglers. At Maiden Lane, a lone city bus stood abandoned in the middle of the square. It looked damaged, probably from a collision with a car. A little piece farther up the road, across from a passage under the Manhattan Bridge, was a hospital. I went around the corner to its emergency entrance, not because I was in need of assistance, but just to see what I could see. What I saw was – nothing. No ambulances pulled up. Emergency workers milled around on the sidewalk with nothing to do. Of all the thing I saw that day, that was the weirdest. The terrorists had bowled a perfect strike and had killed everybody, with nobody left standing, or so it seemed.

If I would have had the presence of mind to go into the hospital and claim to be traumatized, I probably could have later claimed some of the money that was spread around so prodigiously but, frankly, I was in perfect control of my senses, and not being of a fraudulent or litigious nature I continued on my way. What I needed was a drink.

North of the Manhattan Bridge, I found myself out of the dust cloud and smacked the lethal debris off my clothes and shoes as best I could. I joined the stream of refugees which marched north on Allen Street.

The only time I really got alarmed was on Second Avenue at Fifth Street. Somebody had set a television out on the sidewalk, and when the announcer repeated a rumor that one of the hijacked planes had been packed with chemical warfare agents, I felt a sense of alarm.

For me that was the worst of it. I met my girlfriend at Union Square and we went out for lunch and a bottle of wine at an Indian restaurant. Then we caught a crammed bus uptown and drank margaritas at a Mexican restaurant until we were drunk. I joked to a woman that the twin towers would still be standing if they had followed my advice and put Madeleine Albright on the roof as a scarecrow. Displaying the black sense of humor that used to be prevalent in the City before the rigor mortis of political correctness killed any sense of levity, she and her girlfriend both laughed cruelly.

Years passed. The sequence of events in lower Manhattan fast-forwards in my mind: the firemen and cops fighting over the overtime pay and disobeying orders to wear respirators; those same workers becoming ill from lung disease and suing the city; the huge compensation awards paid to the survivors of the victims; finger-pointing over who was negligent; Giuliani’s rehabilitation as “America’s Mayor;” the World Trade Center disaster being turned into a national religion of sanctimony and self-righteousness; the war to scrape Afghanistan clean of terror groups; the use of WTC as a pretext to invade Iraq; the war on France.

With the exception of the invasion of Afghanistan, which was totally proper and correct, the rest of it has been handled as ass-backward as humanly possible, even given people’s natural propensity for imbecilic behavior. Elevation of the WTC disaster to a kind of sideshow allowing all manner of charlatans to capture center stage and use of it to railroad people into a kind of enforced jingoistic patriotism has turned national life into a kind of right-wing witch hunt not seen since the cold war. Now, instead of accusing people of being pinko fellow travelers, the mob is attacking people for being soft on terrorism and unwitting dupes of Bin Laden (whatever happened to him anyway?).

Let’s get this straight, I am not soft on terrorism. On the other hand I am not soft on Bush either. He had advance warning about the airplane attacks, the same as he had advance warning about Hurricane Katrina, but he could not act because he and his appointees do not have the management skills to motivate the bureaucracy. It’s as simple as that – incompetence flowering into full-fledged negligence.

Well, what of it….? The utter devastation of Katrina with its hundreds of thousands of victims, the asian tsunami with its hundreds of thousands of dead, the Pakistan earthquake with 40,000 dean have put the World Trade Center in more or less of its true context, that of a monstrous occurrence more-or-less in line with the miseries being inflicted on the world at large. Maybe it’s time to put it behind us to some extent and look ahead to the future.

Nevertheless, there’s one group of people who are refusing to let go – the surviving families of WTC victims. These people, already heavily indemnified, seem to have an iron grip on any future development plans for the site. It’s like these families have hardened into an irresistible pressure group that nobody can control. After getting rid of a museum they didn’t like, they are now vetoing a PATH station that they say will defile hallowed ground.

Hallowed ground? New York is all hallowed ground. More people died during the Draft Riots of 1863, but nobody is suggesting a moratorium on building in midtown.

Let’s get real!! For a group of what are essentially bridge and tunnel people to have a veto on one of New York’s most valuable and strategic pieces of real estate is not just ridiculous, it’s plain nuts.

These charming and tragically afflicted people should go home, come to grips with their grief and rebuild their lives. And let New York heal itself.

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Posted on 10/15/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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