Being a native new yorker in manhattan on THAT tuesday

that tuesday, on my roof, on that perfectly sunny day, i was standing next to my father. luckily his office was next door to my apartment, so as soon as i saw the smoking tower on tv, i grabbed him and we went upstairs to see it for real. a few minutes later we were staring incredulously at the massive volcanic looking tower of black smoke bending towards brooklyn. there were jet fighters tearing the quiet with their roaring engines as they screamed up and down the Hudson river. the sound shook my ribcage, and my mind reeled at what their presence meant. it wasn't fleet week.

at that point we had no idea what or who had attacked us. a deep seated sense of insecurity was bubbling up within me. the event reeked of religion right away since it was clearly not the usual military attack. since childhood i had watched historical programs about holy war. mostly with my dad, who has a passion for history and actually taught it in a public school before i was born. through the years, he has broken many things down for me. one of them was regarding who i am in the world and what people think of me. i am a large part Jewish, and the meaning of that can change instantly. in major world events, if you are part of an ethnicity that is vastly outnumbered you had better realize that as soon as possible. i guess what i am saying is that although i have never considered myself a part of any religious struggle, that i knew everybody else would. i always knew, from those black and white images of Europe and Russia during the early 20th century that the shit could hit the fan at any moment. in most of Europe in 1940, even if just one of your great great grandparents was part jewish, you were shit out of luck. it wasn't THAT long ago. people aren't THAT different so as not to consider the possibility. but this isn't really about my paranoia about my background. it's about being attacked. it's about that tuesday.

that Tuesday, there wasn't a single commercial plane in the air for the first time in my life. i looked at my father and we both knew that we had been horribly, obscenely, viciously attacked. we were now at war, whether we wanted it, deserved it, or were ready for it. and in this new and terrifying war, the front line was Manhattan. clearly, we were standing in the middle of a huge historical catastrophy. a moment that was immensely larger then we were. it's rare that an event makes me feel as insignificant, while simultaneously making me feel completely connected, as when looking up at a starry night.

Everybody and their mom has a "how close i was to it" story. especially those of us who were on the island on 9/11. i have actually grown quite sick of telling mine. i wasn't really in any danger. i was in between freelance jobs and actually slept late that day. but i guess since i got to watch, from my roof, as the building my mom was working in get completely engulfed in a black wall of smoke from the second collapse, that i had a reason to go a little bat shits. At the time, and from the sound of the explosion, i assumed, the smoke meant absolute destruction for my mother. plus, i spent a day trying to reach my brother who was one of a few American Airline pilots based out of Boston who regularly flew Flight #11. We knew it was one of his flights starting from 10am that morning and didn't hear from him until the next day because there was no phone service in our area.

Couple those two profound scares with an almost complete and utter sense of identification with NYC. and i was left with the most incredible sense of despair i had ever experienced in my life. i had almost forgotten about this feeling. or maybe it had been abused so horrible by politicians since then that i have tried to bury it, so as to remove it as a lever for politicians to pull in my heart. it had become something of a slot machine for them, they pulled on it and pulled on it, and it kept on cashing in for them.

yesterday, randomly, i decided to youtube a bunch of clips. weird first speeches. stuff like Sting's live performance of Fragile on that day. I have a recording where he gives a specific shout out to a friend who had died. this version i think was done before that one. it was before he knew his friend had died.

plus Letterman:

and Stewart:


Stewart actually reminded me the most about how i felt. the intense pain, the inability to pull myself together so as not to cry. I didn't even know at that point if i knew anybody who had perished. it was more or less just a real blow to who i was. it was personal. somebody tried to destroy us and partially succeeded. somebody had melted metal and stone with pure hatred. they snuffed out hundreds of fire fighters lives. lives that were spent, and then crushed while making sure that we were safe. It was obscene. it made me realize how much these simple things really meant to me. how much i loved those around me that also loved this city. we were all suddenly so connected.

I don't know how many people remember what the city was like immediately following, but it was as beautiful as the burning hole was ugly. there was suddenly no sense of race, no sense of separation from those people around you. as much as we were reeling from pain and sudden fear, which was seen in the fact that every little bomb threat sent us running in mad herds through downtown for weeks following, we were also united. not united like those stupid fucking bumper stickers in Kentucky, but REALLY together. the patriotism wasn't thought out, it wasn't a competition, and it wasn't even a question. if you were there. if you had to close your window from the stench. you felt it.

the patriotism brought out the best in New Yorkers. the Moroccan guys at the corner deli told me they couldn't believe how many people were asking them if they were ok and telling them that if there was any trouble that they should call them on their home phones. they had half expected to get mobbed by angry people blaming it on them. riding public transportation was even different. there was a real sense of being on the train with people rather then just having to share the space. there were no poor people, no minorities, no divisions at all. well, i am a white guy so i could be way off base there, but that's what it felt like.

there was this awesome sense of hope. and a sense of global love for us. at that point we were the good guys, the victims. but our victimhood just reminded us of why we were so strong. the attack had just managed to bring us together, and the turn the world to feel sorry for us and identify with our suffering. we were, as Japan once noted, a slumbering giant that had been woken up. it was a crazy sensation when coupled with the utter sense of loss and hurt. it was one of the ugliest, and also one of the most beautiful moments that i can remember as a new yorker.

its sad to note, that i can't feel the same way, that we can't feel the same way, when thousands die across the ocean in explosions of similar magnitude or worse. a key part of the event for me was the closeness of it. that it was in the place that i knew best. where most of my memories happened. i felt the immediacy of the attack more then i have ever felt any attack or disaster before, more so then i felt for the multitudes who died in the tsunami. its a lot harder for me to feel the despair of the people elsewhere them it is for me to feel for those who share my space.

i could tell that this applies even in America. i moved to California a few months later and quickly realized that people that far away, simply couldn't understand except in the abstract, what i had gone through. the fact that the first anniversary of the attack came and went without any thing except specials on tv on the west coast was astounding to me. i couldn't even show up to work and had to call in sick, for fear that people would see my tears. i guess we are human. our sense of empathy and home can only be so large. that is probably the core of why it happened in the first place.

now we are in 2008. it's become pretty obvious what the real tragedy was actually the political aftermath. the event that we dubbed "September 11th" became a video and sound byte. a prostituted means to an end for just a handful of people who were more or less unaffected, and managed to affect their agenda on the rest of us. i wish more people cried about THAT.

after all of the political abuse, the misguided war, the forgotten enemy (and that really kills me. he is still out there somewhere and our guys aren't anywhere near to getting him). all i am able to really care about nowadays, is that the skyline of NYC gets taller. that the south of the island has a beacon high enough for me to see when i have just climbed the stairs out of an unfamiliar train station and need to know which way south is. i never really cared much about those towers, i cried when i was 5 and went to the top of them. but they were a very visible part of my home. i looked to them enough to have them be part of me. now i miss them greatly. its like that old adage, you never know what you have until it is missing.