WTC

Each generation spawns its own tragedy. During my life there have been three: Kennedy, Challenger, and WTC. The previous generation’s was Pearl Harbor. Tragedies generate stories, stories of pain and suffering that serve to anchor us in the suffering of others. Empathy is a strong human emotion. But each of us has our own story of that day, a story that always begins with the same question: Where were you?

That morning I woke early and drove to Vance, Alabama, outside of Tuscaloosa, to continue the interviews that I was conducting with children in state custody, children who had been abused by their parents or guardians. The project was not a fun consulting engagement. The interview that I remember most from that group home was with a boy who spent his infancy in the care of his grandmother, a woman who was the neighborhood drug dealer. When the child was two, there was a dispute between the grandmother and a customer that resulted in the customer shooting and killing the grandmother in the child’s presence. The boy was left alone locked in the house with her corpse for two days. The child suffered deep emotional problems, and I suppose that they will always be with him. Between interviews the staff at the group home told me about the planes, so I stopped the interviews and watched the towers burn and collapse with them. Then I drove home to Birmingham.

Later that afternoon I had an appointment for my annual physical. While I was waiting for the doctor to arrive I finally reached my friend Anne by telephone. The previous year I had stayed with her and her husband in Manhattan when I attended a wedding celebration for a mutual friend. When I worked in the south tower I happened upon Anne in the subway station beneath the complex and that renewed our friendship from college. Anne worked in the north tower. Unbeknownst to me, she had resigned her job earlier that year, so she was safe on the upper west side far from the damage.

For months afterward, I was haunted by a face, the face of man whose name I have long forgotten, a face that I only saw for three months while I was working in the south tower receiving extensive training for a job. The training center was on the hundred and second floor. He was a guard at the transfer point for the elevators on the seventy-eighth floor, the kind of person you normally pass by and do not give a second thought to, but this guy was different. He always joked with us as we passed by, complementing us about something. He seemed excited by life’s possibilities. You notice people like him.

The second plane that hit the south tower near this floor.

For months afterward, the Times ran pictures and short blurbs about the dead, and each day I searched for that man’s smile, but I never saw it. I hope he was one of the lucky ones.

The pianist Andre Watts was scheduled to play that Friday night with the Alabama Symphony at the Stephens Center, and I had tickets. Watts cancelled, citing the inability to get a flight, but they found a replacement who drove to Birmingham from New York and the performance went on. Everyone stood when the orchestra began the evening by playing the national anthem. The next number was Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which brings tears to the eyes in the best of times.

The word fanatic comes from the Latin word for temple, fanum, which later became fanaticus, meaning inspired by a deity. Certainly the word fits the event. The cheap solution is to blame Islam for the tragedy, for the perpetrators were adherents, but to blanket that religion for the actions of a few is unfair, just as it is unfair to blame all southerners for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. Somewhere in my files there is a picture of a dead policeman’s leg that appeared on the front page of the Birmingham Post Herald after Eric Rudolph visited town, a picture that the paper pulled after printing only a few thousand copies.

Still, the role religion played in the tragedy bothers me. Events like these reinforce my doubts. Am I to believe that god cares who wins a football game, but then lets his followers kill thousands in his name, or permits a tsunami to kill one hundred times as many in a great wave?

Evil is as much a part of the human condition as goodness; they are twins forever locked in continuous struggle for the human heart. Just when you think one aspect is ascendent, the other will suddenly appear. This happened on this day, for out of the unfettered hatred arose stories of human goodness that inspire us and give us hope. Many have tried to wrap themselves in this tragedy, but their inflated rhetoric cannot lessen the human tragedy. Those who died were not just names; they were people: husbands, wives, friends, people who made a difference in someone’s life and whose absence makes another’s life poorer. That is the one thing we must not forget.

One other thing lingers in my memory, the view from the tower windows. The sensation was much like that experienced from a plane, the sensation of how small and fragile the world appears from far above. Many of us in the training class were from the south where snow is a rare occurrence. Late one December afternoon it began to snow and there was excitement in the group. After work we rode those same elevators down, but when we arrived we discovered that there was no snow, only a cold rain washing the earth and returning home to the sea.

In this divisive age, let us hope that somehow we can turn this tragedy to some good purpose, not to dwell on what was, but to work toward what we can achieve. The words of Lincoln seem appropriate:

let us strive on to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the nation's wounds;
to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow,
and his orphan --
to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace,
among ourselves, and with all nations.

Comments

[Anoop]

Walter, that's a powerful story about the guard in the Tower; I was in California on a consulting project on 9/11 - our project's key sponsor, the client's CTO, lost his sister who worked in one of the towers; he had to drive from CA to NY as the only way at that time to get across the country.

What really saddens me though is to think about how 9/11 has become less about those that died and more about political capital.

Even beyond the current Administration, just my personal opinion, but I've never been a big fan of Rudy Giuliani - esp. after 9/11 - not only becoming America's Mayor, but profiting handsomely from it. For some reason, Giuliani's exploitation of this tragedy for political and financial gain have always rubbed me the wrong way...

I miss the "unifying force" that was present globally in the aftermath - the feeling that we were on our way towards making Lincoln's words a reality...until people realized there's more opportunity in division.