September 11, 2001
September 11, 2003
Two years. Two years, thousands of lives, two wars, a gaping hole in the middle of Manhattan Island, and countless memorial’s later, Tuesday September 11th, 2001 still haunts the American consciousness. It’s hard to fathom how fast the time has gone since that grave, blue and sunny morning but the day, and its aftereffects remain as vivid as yesterday’s news.
Just take some of the current headlines and no matter how you look at them, they can relate, even in the tiniest detail, to 9-11. On a grand scale, the situation in Iraq (which most would agree was a direct off-shoot to the war on terror in Afghanistan and our inability to hunt down Osama Bin Laden) is still an everyday presence on the nightly news. While in print we still read about a funeral here or a burial service there for the remains of a lost firefighter, while heartwarming stories of single mothers, whose 9-11 babies will now be entering their terrible two’s without fathers, still pop up to remind us of the human value of the historic day.
The circus known as the California governor recall election has its link to the day through Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, while not directly associated with the attacks, made headlines weeks later when his movie, “Collateral Damage” was postponed due to sensitive material. One of the many overreactions we saw in the media, as nobody saw the film anyway, and if they did, weren’t offended by it enough to warrant such public press, but it still makes you think of that post 9-11 era (of which we still feel the ripples) when the dust was blow off of our American flags, the nation as a collective whole was socked in the stomach and awoke to a whole new world where, it seemed anyway, that anything was possible.
“It was like a movie,” wrote the New Yorker’s film critic Anthony Lane in his initial writing after the disaster, and he couldn’t have been more right. The images were Bruckheimerian in their grandness, while being imagined by Bunuel and De Sica combined in a surrealism we haven’t experienced since. The war in Iraq, the blackout of 2003 and the Bills 31-0 whipping of the Patriots on opening day all in a way were as surreal as one could expect, but there is still something about the way those planes cut into the towers and the way in which, miraculously, the giant buildings collapsed down upon themselves, instead of sideways, avoiding possibly hundreds of more casualties, that remains haunting and, in a sickening way, unforgettable.
Yes, it was pure Hollywood, but there are movies that, even great, I can’t remember frame for frame two years hence. But Sept 11th, 2001 is a day that, taken in strides, or as a harmonious whole, I can recount to the near minute. I remember the eight o’clock alarm telling me to get my lazy butt out of bed and ready for the mile walk to class. It hadn’t happened yet, I believe the time came somewhere in my trek from the dorms to Clemens Hall on UB’s North campus, but still, very few were around televisions that early, so only little clues could be gleaned from my surroundings.
My class was Romanticism in English Literature, we were reading Wordsworth and even my professor didn’t know the situation outside those four white walls. A frail, elderly woman taking the class in the waning years of her life came into the room saying something about a fire at the twin towers. Someone else, heard from a distance, “It’s a nightmare,” while a fellow student rushed to the teacher, explaining how he had to leave, “my father works in the North tower”. We finished class early that day, it may have been romanticism, but what awaited us on the televisions was anything but.
The next few hours remain as clear as a bell in my memory bank. That initial computer sit down; all the sites were heavily backed up so I dialed into CNNSI.com to see my first image of the downed towers, “Day of Terror” read the headline, sending a shock through my body as I ran to the gathering crowd around the communal library television. Silent, ashen faces met me, a person on a cell phone, a girl crying on a bench, the long, confusing walk back to my dorm where seven hours of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Aaron Brown showed me the unbelievable footage of destruction, the billowing cloud of dust as the towers fell, and the trickle of human survival stories that would become legend. For a break I watched Bill Forsyth’s wonderful film “Local Hero”, which will be forever in my gratitude for giving me a smile on a day when they were few and far between.
It was, like Anthony Lane so memorably put it, straight out of a movie. But it wasn’t, it was playing out more like cinema verite, the most heinous reality show to premiere that fall. The next few days were wall-to-wall coverage, but slowly things got back to something resembling normalcy.
I remember the concert for New York, with Paul McCartney singing “Freedom” and I remember Dan Rather on Letterman, breaking down like a respected newsman hardly ever does on camera. I remember the ribbon on the scoreboard at Shea stadium and the overwhelming sense of patriotism that rang out from the country. Where it was on September 10th, 2001 we’ll never know, but still today you can catch a glimpse of it on houses here and there, flags and buttons, and shirts that read, “We’ll Never Forget”.
I also remember the campus the following days. School went on as usual, but the discussions were different, even in film classes we were talking about what had happened in New York, rather than the usual discussions of montage and long takes. “What a crazy day,” I wrote as a thesis for a journalism class essay on the disasters, and if you think about it, it seems less and less crazy, as the years go by, and more and more sane. Not sane in the way we can backhandedly justify what happened to us by getting into wars overseas, or ironically sane in the way that now we’re devoting billions of dollars to homeland security that should have been signed years before.
No, it’s a different kind of sanity that spawns a form of serenity one gets when remembering a day a whole generation lost its innocence. In 1929 it was the stock market crash, in ’41 it was December 7th at Pearl Harbor and, in a way, a whole decade came of age with Vietnam. But today we painfully remember the 11th day, of the 9th month of 2001. We remember the helplessness of watching it all unfold on TV, and we feel its tremors today in the staggering economy and in the media with countless television documentaries and specials. It may have looked, and felt, and sounded like a movie, but the all-too brutal reality of the events put a whole new resonance on an overused cliché.
by Adam Suraf