11th
I don’t have a lot of pictures from back then.
This is from within a week of 9/11, the original 9/11, the one we’re so traumatized by that we admonish one another to “never forget” with all the unity of a “Don’t Tread On Me, Bro” bumper sticker.
I had just moved to Pittsburgh. Jack, seen on my lap here, turned 11 a couple of weeks ago. I had moved up here to help start a Web Design BFA program at Robert Morris University, and I had a healthy small business making and hosting websites for mostly small businesses. I was still painting regularly at the time, and I followed what was going on, and where, in the “art world”.
The Taliban wasn’t news to me. During the previous few years, they had become infamous in the art world for their systematic destruction of some of the world’s oldest Buddhist art in Afghanistan. Along the Silk Road had lived +200-foot tall depictions of the Buddha, carved into cliff faces and against cave entrances. They were treasures on the level of the cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux, and the Taliban - in addition to its campaign to roll women’s rights back to the 6th century - had blown them up. With dynamite and all the ceremonious purpose of a 14-y.o. meth head shooting BB guns at beer can effigies of his parents. Well before Sept 11, these guys had broken my heart and enflamed my emotions.
What was news, during my 7:30-8:10 commute to work, on the morning of September 11, 2001, was a story on NPR about the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud on the previous day. The revered leader of the Afghan resistance to the Taliban had granted a rare television interview. The videographers, it turned out, were operatives - but not of the Taliban. This was where the story got interesting to me. The videographers were Al Qaida operatives working with the Taliban to take out Massoud. They packed their camera with explosives, and when they got close enough to Massoud, they detonated their bomb, taking their own lives along with his. It was a significant and demoralizing blow to the Afghan resistance. What got my attention, though, was the involvement of this Al Qaida group that I’d previously associated only with anti-American propaganda and actions in the Arabian Peninsula.
When the first plane hit the first tower, I was heading to my first day of one of my new classes at Robert Morris. I was in my office, looking at Yahoo! Investments stuff, and here comes some crazy images of one of the twin towers with a hole in it. It seemed like an accident. I’d been on enough flights into La Guardia that I felt like I could understand how this could happen. It sucked, I thought, and went to class. A few minutes into class, I mention that a plane had hit the tower, and one of my new students looks up from his fancy-ass phone and tells me the second tower’s been hit, too. No, no, you must be mistaken, I tell him, and he no no’s me and shows me his phone’s news thingy and there’s a picture of both towers with holes, smoking, attacked. That’s the moment I realized the gravity of the day.
What happened that day is that so many of us shared a deeply significant experience. That, in and of itself, is a powerful and yearned-for thing. We don’t seek calamity, but we can’t really deny its galvanizing power. It has long since become cliché to observe that, in those days after 9/11, we felt oneness and kinship and unity and damnit where did the sense of hope and strength of those days go?
Yes, that awareness of oneness has mostly departed us. It didn’t take us too long to go back to living in our heads. “Never forget,” some of us warn others. But that entire ship sailed years ago, in the minutes and hours after the first plane hit the first tower. As we lived and breathed and thought and reacted, past shared experience to individual and religious and political and tribal and regional reactivity to the tragedy of that day’s events, we became un-one rather immediately - even if that variegation showed only over time.
I was in the grocery store later that afternoon, stockpiling drinking water and candles in case the apocalypse were to get seriously underway, and the guy in front of me in line (who was doing the same thing) turned back to me and said, “Fuckers. I say we bomb them back to the Stone Ages!” I felt like I’d felt as a probably-Aspergers kid learning to detect sarcasm years before. I searched his eyes for signs of softness, for a hint of relenting, for that humanity to share. I couldn’t find it. He was serious, and he was searching me too. For anger, for blood-thirsty resolve, for that humanity to share.
Standing there, close enough to smell one another, we were nonetheless like ships in the night. A hospital boat and an aircraft carrier, each shining its light at the other, awaiting a sign. Friend or foe. Hammer or nail. Us or them. Right there next to my fellow American, that’s the most alone I’ve ever felt.
Never forget.
