----- November 18, 2001 -----

It seemed like the world was coming to an end on September 11th – but we march on. I went to Ground Zero a couple of weeks ago with a friend. She is from out of state, had only lived in New York for about a year, and spent most of that out on Long Island. For her it was a little unreal. I mean, who can truly grasp the reality of over five thousand dead? For me it was very personal. My senior year in high school, the school moved into a new building, just a couple of blocks away from the towers. We had an unobstructed view of the World Trade Center, right down the West Side Highway from us. My friends and I hung out in the neighborhood after school. We shopped at Rudy’s on Chambers, off Church Street, for our fund-raising bake sales. Our senior picture was taken from an upper floor of the school, with the whole senior class in Battery Park. The first bombing of the towers, on February 26, 1993, caused the classroom windows to rattle when the bombs went off on. I was in English class. I’d intended to cut school that day but had plans in the city for later that night, so figured I might as well go in. It was my 18th birthday. That attack seems foolish – attack America? Who did they think they were?! Did they really think they could bring the magnificent towers down? It was unthinkable.	Attack America?... It was unthinkable.
After the senior prom some people went to Battery Park to watch the sun rise. Then had breakfast at Gee Whiz, a diner in the shadow of the towers, on Greenwich, before finally going home. The December after graduation, I met one of my high school ‘girls’ for lunch and then we went Christmas shopping on the Concourse. I loved the Christmas store, went back every year. And later, I continued to shop in the area, I brought friends to see the towers and the Statue of Liberty, to hang out in Battery Park. The area wasn’t frightening after the 1993 attack. A couple of summers later I interned with the New York City Department of Transportation, Bridge Inspections – located at 2 Rector Street, just two blocks from the end of the World Trade Center complex. I ate lunch almost every day in Liberty Plaza, across from the towers. They blew up Liberty Plaza. Liberty Plaza. That name should have new meaning now. When, right after the attack, it was thought that the Palestinian Liberation people – the PLO – had done it, my first reaction was that we’d brought it on ourselves. All that aid for so many years given to one side of the fight while we made a show of talking peace. America had been waging was in the Middle East for years. This was just the first time it had been brought home to us. To the US. We were reaping what we’d sowed.	Battery Park... wasn't frigtening [in 1993]
Then the news said that this was not retribution but some madman’s concept of a holy war wreaked on us because we were the biggest evil in the world – how can you react reasonably to that? Yes, the US had aided rebels in his country, doing our bit to further Democracy in the world. We had not acted with one-tenth the military power we have at our command, not even to when American citizens were attacked, or in defense of civil liberties when women were brutalized by the insanity of the Taliban regime. We waited until the fight was brought home to us. Until the number of civilians, of non-combatants, numbered in the thousands. And then our president went on the air to address America and spoke of the evil ones to be put down. Part of me cheered with the rest of the country. We were proud of our president. And part of me shivered in fear at his choice of words. How many more to die? And, now that we’d been proven vulnerable on our shores, how many more attacks would we have to endure before people stopped speaking of God and evil as excuses to kill? So now the Taliban has been routed. And we’re in the middle of it, working to get a Democratic government in place. Hurray for America. What took us so long to act? How one nation treats over half its population – it’s women – wasn’t enough to get us into the fight. If my neighbor here in the US had acted so toward his wife I could have called the cops, and they would have come put him in jail. When was being done to Afghani women was done to women here, in the US, our police stepped in, when they were called. An organization for the liberation of Afghani women has been asking for aid since the 70’s. And the US did nothing.	When the president spoke... I shivered.
But that’s the world. I live in New York. And my 16 year old cousin has to hold his breath on the way to school – he attends my alma mater, Stuyvestant, just blocks away from the towers – because of the fallout of those smoldering ruins. How am I supposed to feel? What am I supposed to think? Our popular entertainment – TV shows like “Seventh Heaven,” “Law and Order” and “Family Law” – brought the atrocities of the Taliban home to us, into our living rooms, and still we, as a nation, did nothing to stop it. Instead in the wake of 9/11, we turned on one another, suspected our neighbors of being terrorists, refused to fly with anyone “Arab looking.” And don’t even get me started on the idiot who thought now was the time to enact his own little war on the nation, sending Anthrax through the mail. I thought I was untouched by that – until I got a paper cut opening a package and found myself scrubbing my hands in near-scalding water and making a doctor’s appointment. Fortunately I didn’t personally know anyone who was in the towers at the time of the attack. The daughter of my aunt’s dear friend, a women she’d seen grow up, who’s children she’d first held shortly after they’d been born, was on the plane from Boston. A week after the memorial service, they found body parts. So, while still breaking down in tears whenever she spoke of the Norma or her memorial, my aunt was helping plan the funeral. My dad was not so fortunate – a good friend, a young man he’d trained, was in the first tower struck. Sobian had his back to the windows as they came crashing in. But he made it out, with some help from his co-workers, and is recovering. Two other people whom my father has known for years have not been in contact with him since the attack – we don’t know if they made it out. But they were both on upper floors in Tower 1. It’s something that is always in the back of my mind. The type of thing I manage to forget, sometimes for days, and remember and catch my breath, have an icy feeling in the pit of my stomach. And we march on…

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