11 years later

I remember 11 years ago today, on a similarly beautiful, clear Tuesday morning, I received a wakeup call from a friend who told me the first inkling of the bad news — the towers had been hit. The previous night, Michael Jordan had hinted that he was returning to the NBA, so I thought my friend was calling to tell me this basketball news and I wondered why he had to tell me before 9am (which back then was pretty early for me). I turned on the TV. I called my parents to tell them what was happening. As they turned on the TV, there were images of smoke rising from the Pentagon, and they were confused why I was talking about the WTC. Later, I saw one tower collapse, called my parents again, and we watched together as the second tower collapsed, unsure if we were watching a replay or live feed of another event. The newscasters live on air were also unsure.

I walked to the department and hugged a fellow graduate student whom I barely knew. I stood on the roof of Pupin and looked south, trying to remember what the skyline used to look like. I went to the cathedral to donate blood, to feel like there was something for me to do. People on the streets all had the same dazed look on their faces. That day, and to a lesser extent that entire Fall, everyone in New York felt a sudden kinship with other New Yorkers. There were crazy rumors flying around that day, like that the Sears Tower had been hit, and that a truck filled with explosives had been found parked at the base of the George Washington Bridge. When the buildings collapsed, we initially thought that 50,000 lives had been lost.

The fires at the site of the towers apparently kept burning or smoldering for a long time after. Strangely, every Friday for the next four weeks or so, the winds would blow north and even 7 miles uptown at Columbia we would smell the caustic scent of burning... I don't know what.

I find it interesting to reflect on how that day affected our world in ways that it was impossible to foresee. At the time, I thought that it heralded a new era in which events like that would become relatively commonplace, eventually leading to people with the wrong ethnic background being rounded up in camps. Thankfully, we haven't reached such a dystopian extreme, but we (Americans) have become a bit more fearful and a bit more violent, and the phrase "September 11" has been used as often for the purpose of political gamesmanship as in the context of serious policy discussions, at least among the conversations I've heard.

I don't have a conclusion.