Chicago Loop, September 11, 2001:
Like most other office workers, I was quietly working on a
now-forgotten but at the time urgent project when a co-worker walked by and
told our floor that she thought a plane had just hit one of the NY World Trade
twin towers. ‘That’s a shame,’ I thought, resuming my urgent whatever-it-was, ‘that
an accident could happen in such an unfortunate location.’ That might seem naïve,
but unlikely accidents do happen. In fact, the world’s first commercial aviation
disaster was the 1919 fiery death of the hydrogen-filled blimp, Goodyear’s
the Wingfoot Express, as it plummeted into the heart of Chicago’s financial
district and, like Robin Hood splitting the arrow, cleanly through the skylight
of the Continental Bank, vaporizing passengers, bank customers and tellers. The
Continental survived, and was actually down the street from where I was working,
in Chicago’s Sears Tower. (BTW, I will not call an old building by a new name;
I don’t care how much money crossed palms. Sears built it and they get to keep
it, even if they are mostly bankrupt now. Same with the defunct Continental.)
In a few more minutes,
however, someone else on the floor whispered that that they heard the “accident”
could have been an attack. I believe that’s when ears perked up, especially in
Chicago’s tallest building. This was before the widespread use of the Internet,
at least in our office. We didn’t even have a TV set. I decided I could spare a
minute to go downstairs to a café that I knew had a TV, and sure enough his CNN
feed now showed both towers smoking. By the time I got back upstairs, my office
was swarming with people calling husbands and wives and packing their things
and maybe not even remembering to turn off computers or inform their bosses.
One such worker was a solid bank officer that I had known for years, turning wide-eyed
and telling me he couldn’t afford to leave his young family behind. The man
left that day and never came back, applying for and taking a job in a much
lower building.
It was less heroic than it was fear of getting behind at
work, but I muttered to the fleeing workers that we should stay put. “The
terrorists have done what they have done. Why give them more credit than they
deserve by going into a panic?” I said, mostly in vain. But by the time our
floor was reduced to a skeleton crew of about a dozen, the building management
and police were going door to door, saying there were reports of unidentified
planes in the air and that the Sears Tower was considered a prime target. C’est
la vie, I thought, I’ll take the day off and tomorrow everything will be back
to normal.
I didn’t realize that in the Sears Tower, at least, normal
would never resume.
And perhaps the old normal wasn’t a good standard, anyhow.
Those “unidentified planes” that authorities thought could be terrorists were
innocent passenger jets heading to O’Hare. How could the federal bureaucracies
not even know that? In retrospect, how could they have turned a blind eye to
foreign nationals taking airplane lessons who wanted to learn how to fly but not
land them? Before 911 I routinely traveled through airports with folding
knives, Xacto blades, you name it—but how could we not have known the damage a
simple box cutter could do?
As I was ushered out of the Tower, it didn’t take me long to
realize that we were suddenly in a new world. Pouring out of the basement doors
in the alley of the nearby Federal Reserve Bank were dozens of heavily armed
troops. They pointed their machine guns ahead of them, sweeping to the left and
right as they walked down the suddenly deserted streets of the Loop. I didn’t
even know there were soldiers in there. Did anyone? ‘This is the new Beirut,’ I
said to myself as they passed me by. And there’s me, trying to not resemble whomever
it was they were looking for.
In order to go a different direction than the one in which
the machine guns were headed, I walked over to and then down LaSalle Street. Like
Maxwell Street or Lake Shore Drive, LaSalle Street is a storied part of Chicago.
The four or so blocks that begin with the towering Board of Trade are lined
with dozens of international bankers, traders and brokers, leveraging more financial
power than can be imagined. And while it is said that more money changes hands
on LaSalle Street on a given day than on any other place on earth, I had a
friend who once repeated that saying in the best possible context. She was a
tour guide on a red trolley tourist bus full of Japanese sightseers, continuing
the thought as they pulled up to the institution at the other end of the Loop,
Chicago’s City Hall. “And folks,” she said, “all that money on LaSalle Street
ain’t nothing compared to the amount of money that changes hands here!”
I doubt I was thinking about my friend and her ill-fated
tour guide career (yes, that snark got her canned), because the gloom and the
terror were becoming more real as I continued down LaSalle. I p
assed a
storefront that was locked up but which had a TV set turned on and facing out.
I was one in a small crowd there to see the first tower fall to the ground.
How I met my life partner:
I continued to my destination, another bank, where I was heading
to pick up a friend who lived in my neighborhood. In her office, I saw the
second tower fall. I also met her friend Kathy and I remembered talking with
her at a different level about what we were seeing. Financial service companies
tend to be ripe with fairly straightforward conservative types, the “let’s go
kick some terrorist butt and see how they like it” kind of thing.
But with Kathy we engaged at a deeper level, realizing that
a world of stark contrasts was going to be forever blurred. We rued the fact
that there could be more wars in the US’s future because of the attack, and
that more war would in turn breed more terrorism. Not many of my coworkers and financial
services peers would have been able to understand that point of view in 2001. I
wonder if they do now?
In any case, that’s where and how I met my better half,
though it’s not as weird as it sounds. We didn’t start dating until a couple
years later. To this day, though, I have yet to meet another couple who met
during 911. It’s a strange conversation point that usually requires this
long-form explanation.
As each day passed after 911, the day grew in importance.
911 became a dark membrane of memory, separating one world from another. For
weeks, the passenger jets disappeared in the sky, but were replaced with
screaming military jets criss-crossing Chicago. Looking for something? Making
us feel better? People in small towns barely on a map thought they would be the
next to be attacked. Rumblings of war clouds began to be heard over the White
House, and I stood by the feeling I discussed that day with Kathy that nothing
good would come of it. The invasion of Afghanistan wasn’t unexpected, and the
world as a whole stood by as we chased down the lines of command behind the 911
terrorism. But it wasn’t enough. And when President Bush invaded Iraq, I knew
something wasn’t right.
After 911, part one—The US military:
Time has shown me and all others suspicious of the Iraq
invasion to be correct in our distrusts of the US’s motives and actions. Saddam
was a very bad man, but hardly a viable threat to the US. And the power vacuum
caused by our abrupt invasion did, in fact, create a far worse and far more
nebulous and intractable group of terrorists. Letting things run their course in
Saddam’s corrupt world would have most likely, in my opinion, resulted in him
falling, like other tyrants, beneath the self-grown Arab Spring. The Arab
Spring didn’t cure all problems, but the US needs to realize we can’t save
people from themselves. I’m not averse to using some military force to perhaps
help others willing to overthrow their own tyrants, but it isn’t our job to be
the world’s puppet master, even were that a possibility.
In my opinion, two completely different 2-term presidents
mishandled our major foreign engagements after 911. We now have a third try
with yet another completely different type of president. We do not yet now the
extent of his military plans, but President Trump is headed back to
Afghanistan, backing up an unpopular and highly corrupt government with our
troops. In the past 17 years, I’m sure the US military may have diverted or dissuaded
some terrorist attacks with our troop deployments and bombing engagements, but
I don’t think we can build political regime change through violence. I wonder
sometimes if we can really tell the players without a scorecard. We failed to
do so in Vietnam, and we seem to continue to fail to understand that we can’t
force anyone, friend or foe, to change by pointing the barrel of a gun at them.
The greatest success, post WWII, in my opinion, was one in
which the US military, for all its efforts, had no part. Despite thousands of
nuclear bombs, endless threats and tangled webs of deception that could keep John
La Carre writing if he lived to be a thousand, the Iron Curtain fell from the
inside. We could have banged our heads on it for the rest of earth’s days, but
the USSR, the most significant threat to the world since Hitler, fell apart
because East Germans, Czechs, Romanians, Armenians and everyone else, including
Russians, began watching 80’s US TV. “Dallas” and “The Cosby Show” showed there
was a world outside of the socialist breadlines. For those of us who lived when
the curtain fell, we remember, with amusement perhaps, that designer jeans, the
coveted but forbidden fruit, seemed to be what actually ended the USSR. We may
or may not have been able to beat the USSR in war with tanks and missiles, but
there is no doubt that, given time, capitalism beats socialism. I wish this was
a lesson learned that could be translated for Afghanistan, Yemen or Iran.
As I said, though, I won’t pretend to be any kind of expert
on foreign policy. I’m a civilian, one of many that can’t distinguish one sand
dune or bunker from another. The situation in North Korea, however, which was
incredibly let go by three successive
2-term presidencies, has certainly created a new level of threat that cannot be
ignored. Whenever weapons of mass destruction are stockpiled the line has been
crossed. As with all despots, it is important that his own people take down
Kim. How this is done remains to be seen. The
Economist recently opined that he biggest immediate threat if it goes badly
is not to the US, but to innocent South Korean and Japanese, and the North Koreans
themselves. The prospect of North Korea selling nuclear bombs to criminal and
terrorist groups, however, should raise hackles about the terrorism threat they
pose. The destruction of the twin towers, in terrorist circles, was seen as a
dramatic victory against the West. I can’t forget seeing Palestinians lining
their streets in praise of the 911 terrorists’ deeds. There is little doubt that a nuclear attack would
be a logical next step for a group of enemies seeking prestige as “war heroes”
among uneducated or terrorist-leaning populations.
After 911, part two—The US homeland
What has worked then?
As is plainly seen, I’m often critical of our foreign
entanglements. However, when you compare to other peaceful nations the frequency
and extent of terrorism on US soil, I fail to see how anyone could deny our domestic
anti-terrorist success. And that’s with a rather porous border, which I am not
in favor of maintaining. I do think it is important to know why foreign
nationals are in our nation, and why.
That being said, the attacks we have suffered post-911 have
been of a different sort than we see elsewhere in the world. All violence is
wrong and any death or injury deplorable, but most of the large-scale terrorism
inspired by Muslim extremists has been contained or thwarted here in the US. Those
events that have happened have normally involved US residents who were
self-radicalized and hard to detect. Outside of the influence of Muslim hate
groups, the US has also suffered isolated terrorist acts inspired by other
race-hate groups of both white and black separatist or supremacist ideologies. Although
I feel terribly for all innocents killed by criminals inspired by race hate
groups, I don’t feel this is a widespread threat. Most US residents of all
races disavow extremists who misrepresent other races. Most US citizens of any
race look at violent extremists of whatever persuasion as worthless thugs, or perhaps
even as enemies of man and God.
Some bemoan we give up too much personal freedom in order to
enjoy freedom from acts of mass terrorism. I strongly disagree. We don’t want
to revert to McCarthyism or to the Salem Witch Trials, but we do need to take responsibility
for ourselves. The government can’t do it all, but if they need to bug someone’s
phone in order to prevent a North Korean H-bomb from going off over Chicago,
then I’m willing to make that sacrifice. Even if they bugged my phone by
mistake, I have nothing to hide, and neither should you. The losses of personal
freedom in general have been petty ones, and the gains in collective security,
compared to the rest of the peaceful world, have been significant. We may not
realize how good we have it here, because the next large terrorist act hasn’t
succeeded since 911. Perhaps it never will, and our ignorance will continue to
be our bliss.
This rosy assessment of mine could end with a single act. If
that were to happen, especially if the attack was due to a nuclear or chemical
WMD, we would be having a new conversation. We’ve certainly had our share of
security failures. TSA itself recently received failing grades for its inability
to identify and seize dummy guns smuggled in hundreds of carry-ons. So maybe deterring
the next 911 is part luck. But I also think it depends on something altogether
more important, and prevalent, than blind luck: the innate goodness of people.
That’s what I really believe, at my core. Most people, despite whatever
circumstances in which they were born, are able to hear a better, inner voice
within that can guide them into how to live as a good person. I believe most
people chose to hear that inner guide. If they didn’t, not only would we be
having a new conversation, but no government in the universe could protect us
from ourselves.
What about you? If you were alive before and after 911, what
has your experience been? Where do you think we go from here?
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