Long ago, a world ago really, I and an employee of Reynolds Aluminum refurbished old computers, mostly pre-iMac Apple product, and gave them to teachers, under-resourced schools, churches, other nonprofits, and individual families. I was at Virginia Commonwealth University, driving to pick up a system with good performance, when I heard that an airliner struck the World Trade Center. It was deemed an awful accident.
My contact was weeping when she opened her apartment door. I said I could come later, figuring that some personal crisis had made her hysterical. She blurted out something about the second plane, and I knew the awful truth. We loaded the computer, and I arrived at work in time to watch both towers fall. I'd heard on NPR the developing story of the Pentagon attack and an airliner crashing in Pennsylvania.
The world had gone sideways in 30 minutes. It never got back on track, as far as I am concerned.
At the time I was teaching first-year writing, and class met that day. One student's father was home sick; his business partner and all their employees died in one of the Towers. The man was wracked by grief and the belief that he might have saved lives had he been present. In another campus building, the body guards of Prince Sultan's son (one of his 32 children) rushed him off campus. He'd been a freshman for a couple of weeks. On September 12, his was the only civilian airliner to fly, back to Saudi Arabia. While NBC news reported on some suspicious activities of another Saudi Prince who left the country that day, presumably on the same aircraft, the Richmond connection seems to have vanished.
I've never forgiven the Bush Administration for their ill-planned war in Iraq. But on 9/11, I upbraided a fellow UR employee who said I was "jumping to conclusions" when I said Al Qaeda had staged the attacks and we'd soon be at war in Afghanistan. His ignorance of geopolitics I'd studied for decades stunned me. I told him, more or less, that he was a liberal fool. And there I was, a fellow Leftist, giving one of my own hell.
That moment and all that followed, including peace marches, abuse of prisoners of war, secret courts, TSA screening, chest-thumping patriotism by families that would never let a child serve in the military hardened us and set us on the path to the disaster off Iran's shores now, let by a President who makes George W. Bush look temperate, wise, and peace-loving. It all comes rushing back to me 25 years later. Maybe the course we took began with the contested 2000 election, but we are now living in a damaged nation. I don't know that we'll bounce back soon, as we did after Vietnam and Watergate, though that era may have been an act of willful forgetting.
Our new feeds are full of existential dread about AI, climate change, and a rotten President's foolish actions. Maybe we should instead reflect on how we got to this impasse? What sorts of short-term thinking and other priorities kept us from fixing the damage done after 9/11?
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