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| Aerial view of the Pentagon showing emergency crews responding when a hijacked commercial jetliner crashed into the southwest corner of the building during the 9/11 terrorists attacks. |
While the passengers of Flight 93 were wrestling the hijackers for control of the airliner that was headed to our nation's capital, I was in an 11th floor office in view of the White House.
September 11, 2001, was one of those picture-postcard-perfect, not quite summer anymore but not quite fall yet either, absolutely gorgeous clear-blue-sky days that make you glad to be alive—right up until 8:46 a.m., when Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center and a madman unleashed mass murder upon an unsuspecting public.
Normally, I wouldn't have been at work yet that time of the morning, but I'd gone in early to work on a new web site we were going to be launching in early October. I worked on the 11th floor of an office building in downtown D.C., mere blocks from the White House. I remember like it was yesterday, hearing the puzzlement in the voice of my co-worker across the hall relaying the news that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. I remember looking out the window and thinking how on earth do you manage to fly a plane into the World Trade Center on a crystal-clear day like today?
And then the news broke about the second plane, and we knew it wasn't an accident.
And then another co-worker down the hall got a phone call from her husband, who worked across the street from the Pentagon, and reported that he'd seen a third plane strike the Pentagon.
And then of course there was Flight 93, which had also been hijacked and was believed to be headed toward Washington, D.C. But fighter jets were scrambling to shoot it down. There are antiaircraft guns on the roof of the White House, people said. Not that this was much comfort, of course, given that shooting down a plane that was overhead would've showered debris on the streets below.
Somewhere in there, I called my husband, whose job at the time took him all around the D.C. metro area, to make sure he wasn't anywhere near downtown. He'd already gotten the call from his office telling him the rest of the day's appointments were canceled and to head home, and that's what he was doing.
It was all so surreal. It seemed impossible to believe that I could actually die, right there at my desk, doing my job. Of course no one was going to aim a plane at a private office building, unconnected to the federal government, would they? There was no reason to believe we were actual targets. But the hijackers could aim for the White House and miss. The White House is a much smaller target than the Twin Towers, and nowhere near as tall. A 12-story office building in White House airspace would be much easier to hit than the White House itself.
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| The reason Flight 93 never made it to D.C. on 9/11. |
And of course even after we'd heard that Flight 93 had crash-landed in Pennsylvania, there was no way to know if other planes were headed our way, or worse.
I've never seen the streets of D.C. as empty as they were that day as I left my office building and headed toward the Metro. I had the eerie feeling that I was the last person left on earth. Just me, and the pilots of the F-16s circling overhead.
But this is not the story I want to tell.
The story I want to tell is about how we respond to violence, especially when it comes without warning and unprovoked, like it did on 9/11.
One night when I was 19, my boyfriend and I were giving a friend a ride home. She lived on Eddy Street in Providence. Not exactly the East Side, but not South Providence, either. We drove by a young woman walking along the sidewalk with a baseball bat slung over her shoulder. The streets were dark and all but deserted. For all we knew, this young woman was walking home from a baseball game, but for some reason my friend got it into her head that she was carrying the bat for self-defense. My friend made a comment to the effect that the other woman "really knew how to take care of herself."
I was appalled. I said the day I can't walk down the street without carrying a weapon, someone may as well kill me, because that's not a world I want to live in.
I continued to believe that, even after 9/11, and still do to this day.
Two weeks before I was scheduled to have major surgery, George W. Bush used the premise of Saddam Hussein's WMDs to go to war in Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. There I was, stuck home in bed, unable to do much else but watch TV—even reading was too much of a strain—and the war was inescapable. It didn't help my recovery one bit.
Oh, but we got Saddam, didn't we? Yay for us. Another bad man come to a bad end at our hands, cornered in a hole not much bigger than the grave he ended up in shortly after we found him, hanged by his own people. As Barney Frank so memorably said to Eliot Spitzer after Osama bin Laden was assassinated, "Using physical force to reform every bad government in the world would exhaust us financially and be useless."
Yes, not only am I a progressive, but I'm also a pacifist. There, I said it.
I've never met a war I liked. Not even the so-called good war, World War II. Howard Zinn deconstructed that one for me when I was at BU. He was in the Air Force in WWII and came home a confirmed pacifist. Like Kurt Vonnegut. I defy you to read Slaughterhouse-Five and try to tell me anything good can ever be accomplished through war.
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| The Tribute in Light on the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center (image by David Shankbone). |
And yet here we are, 10 years after 9/11, at war in two countries that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks. Osama bin Laden, the stateless actor who committed the atrocities, is dead; we executed him five months ago. One million Afghan and Iraqi civilians have been killed in our quest for vengeance for the 3000 killed on 9/11. How many more must die? And to what end?
As Christopher Hitchens wrote in his "10 years after 9/11" piece in Slate (I refuse to use the word "anniversary" in connection with events as horrific as those of 9/11):
Ten years ago I wrote to a despairing friend that a time would come when al-Qaida had been penetrated, when its own paranoia would devour it, when it had tried every tactic and failed to repeat its 9/11 coup, when it would fall victim to its own deluded worldview and—because it has no means of generating self-criticism—would begin to implode. The trove recovered from Bin Laden's rather dismal Abbottabad hideaway appears to confirm that this fate has indeed, with much labor on the part of unsung heroes, begun to engulf al-Qaida. I take this as a part vindication of the superiority of "our" civilization, which is at least so constituted as to be able to learn from past mistakes, rather than remain a prisoner of "faith."It's hard to argue that the world isn't better off without Osama bin Laden. I won't pretend I was sorry to hear that he'd been killed. But enough is enough already. There will always be people that someone could argue the world would be better off without. Once you go down that road, where does it end? Personally, I think the world would be a better place without people who cheer executions. Doesn't mean I want them dead.
As Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Then again, a Jewish friend once told me that the Old Testament adage doesn't mean what people think it means. She says Talmudic scholars say it means that if you injure someone, you must provide compensation.
I'm not religious, so I really can't say. But whoever wrote that stuff about turning the other cheek and doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you? That's someone I could get behind.