Daddy, Tell Me About 9-11
Nine Eleven was an explosion. Was I there? Yes & no.
Back in 2001, twenty years ago this month, there were roughly ten million people in the New York metropolitan area. What happened there, on September Eleventh, got witnessed from ten million different perspectives, for the people who were nearby.
I wasn’t one of those people, anymore -- having moved upstate seven years earlier, a hundred miles safely away, working at a daily flagship newspaper in Middletown, owned by Dow Jones, as their obituary editor.
If you draw concentric circles away from ground zero, each radius distance from those ten million perspectives experienced a different level of intensity. Those in the outer boroughs could see the smoke plumes billowing; people in downtown Manhattan could all smell the fumes, and watch the jumpers falling down before the structures collapsed -- or rather, disintegrated.
Back at the Times Herald-Record, I was all alone at my desk, in the Classified Department, because nobody was selling ads that day. My shift began at ten, which followed a production deadline of 8pm. It was a graveyard shift, of sorts, haha.
My girlfriend had woken me up earlier from work, after the first plane crashed, telling me to turn on the television. We were both “essential workers,” she for the State, and myself as mainstream media. Technically the roads were closed by the time I went in, due to national emergency, and it was unclear when, or if, I would be allowed to drive home, twenty minutes commute back to Port Jervis.
That work day wasn’t busy at all, because the phones were all down, as well as the internet. Only a few obits came in, while I prepared routine death notices submitted the day before. A skeletal editorial staff deliberated which front page headline to use -- total dead, or just the number of dead firefighters. Mostly the few staff members sat around the cafeteria, watching tv, those same memorable clips now endlessly repeated for the past twenty years.
So there I was, on September Eleventh, watching the “events of,” on television, much like the hundred million other Americans on the East Coast beyond the range of binoculars -- while the rest of the world rubbernecked over our shoulders, via global news conglomerates. The spectacle was very packaged -- some would say, prepackaged.
I was no stranger to New York City, and the World Trade Center, or even to Afghanistan for that matter. As an undergraduate at the City University, I was a former accredited United Nations correspondent, having written in-depth articles about the eleven years of fighting which continued between rival ethnic tribal Afghani warlords, following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989. By the time Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated one day prior to Nine Eleven, I heard about it right away, understanding exactly who he was. Afghanistan is a suburb of New York, and every person there has a cousin or two driving taxi cabs in Manhattan.
My first visit to the World Trade Center occurred when I was just barely fourteen. A neighborhood friend had convinced me to cut school with him to witness the Iranian hostage parade at City Hall, just a month or two earlier. Ronald Reagan recently assumed office, it was 1981. Emboldened, four of us cut school again in the Spring, taking the Number Seven train out from Flushing, for an all-day excursion. Climbing out of the subway station to street level, we all stared up towards the sky in amazement, like newcomers typically do. Quickly we gathered our wits about us, and pretended to know where we were heading. There is an unspoken vibe which you pick up on in the city, some would call it a state of mind; New Yorkers don’t look up.
We made three stops in Manhattan that day; the first was to a gaming shop on East Thirty-Third Street, called the Compleat Strategist (which is still there today) -- we were a bunch of geeks who liked to play Dungeons & Dragons. Next, our group arrived at an office building on Broadway, where one friend’s dad worked; he hadn’t seen his father in about five years, and wanted to confront him to ask why. We went with him for moral support. The final visit was the Twin Towers, riding the large plush elevators to the observation deck up top, looking out over the Tri-State area. We took the E train back home to Queens.
Nobody missed us, or knew we were gone. I went on to make numerous additional trips, sometimes by myself, playing arcade games below Penn Station, wandering around Manhattan wayward & underage, slowly absorbing that unspoken New York vibe. It’s the ant’s life, where you blend in, keep your head down, moving along, saying as few words as necessary, preferably none at all. It’s okay to ask the time, or for a light, or directions, maybe what breed of dog, but anything else is an imposition.
At the same time, a New Yorker, who might routinely step over a homeless vagrant sleeping across the sidewalk, on his way to work, will also carry a crippled lady down sixty-eight flights of stairs in her wheelchair, out the burning skyscraper just about to collapse. This is an instinctive reflex which goes without saying -- there isn’t any “Heimlich Maneuver” how-to chart hanging on the wall, explaining when & where these lines are drawn. If the situation is uncertain, there’s a curt urban politeness towards approaching complete strangers: “Do you need help?” Or, “are you lost?” When a New Yorker asks such things, it’s rhetorical, merely requesting permission to assist.
Eventually I grew up, while the city evolved around me, new towers cutting into the skyline of my youth as intruders, finally becoming familiar old friends, which one day suddenly disappeared, noticeably absent, gone forever like a missing pair of front teeth. I was driving a delivery van around the five boroughs, at the age of twenty one. Those street names rattled off the infamous radio calls, I knew quite well, craning my neck up for a glance at those unfathomably tall shiny sleek landmarks, while whipping around the Battery instead of inching cross-town; you could barely see the top of ‘em. And whenever you heard those big engines rolling up behind you, nobody yelled GTFO the way; it’s something you said to yourself, silently, an exclamation point. Because even a lowly pigeon knows when to keep pecking along, versus when to haul butt, instantaneously, without even thinking. The abbreviation for WTC, is FDNY. Woop-woop.
Thinking back in hindsight, the Two Towers stood over us like a giant tuning fork, with a huge antenna vibrating on top; while concentric circles of enduring trauma resonated across time, forming a square & compass, a specific ultra-high pitch frequency, if you listen closely, even now, with all six of your senses, it still rings out. Can you hear it?
Those ten million pairs of first-hand eyeballs came and went, with many trillions of footprints criss-crossing each other’s paths, in overlapping succession. Many within a hundred mile radius know somebody who escaped, or somebody who didn’t. It could have been you, it could have been me. I suppose every day of the year, there’s a different group of young teenagers cutting school for the first time, venturing downtown into the big city. World Trade was easy to get to, tickets were cheap, the view was worth the price.
The next day at work, the obits started pouring in. My job was to get them all perfect, just like any other day; because one wrong pronoun, even back then, can ruin a funeral, and you only get one shot. Additionally, I had to ferry all the “newsworthy” obits over to Editorial, who were having a week long feeding frenzy, feasting upon the carnage. The headlines blared WAR, which meant invasion of Afghanistan. A supervisor slapped an American flag onto the side of my desk, run-off cheaply on color newsprint in their “Special Edition.” Kind of like a giant patriotic coupon to display from your living room window.
Each year, unscathed politicians gather before their communities, and blow hot air on the anniversary, about how great our country is, and how terrorists attacked America “because they hate our freedoms.” I wish they would STFU already, two decades later, and start digging into the White House betrayal of their own nation. I wrote an article listing over a hundred anomalies to the warmongering mainstream narrative, only just last year, first ever printed in my region, still unrebutted. From that very day, I didn’t buy the BS, but am shocked at how long it’s taken America to catch up.
You may have expected me to recount extraordinary tales of courage and miraculous rescues, like those of William Rodriguez, or Genelle Guzman, or Richie Conte, who I met. Instead, I’m simply gonna mention, honorably, the Lion of Panjshir, father of his country, very first victim of Nine Eleven, who had to be eliminated, in Takhar Province -- before the Project for a New American Century could begin, a thirty years war. I’m down with him.
No, the world didn’t end on Nine Eleven, those same billionaires built a brand new building, even bigger, atop the ruins of the last bunch they built originally, profiting immensely from their destruction. The Afghanis are still selling kebabs down by the Brooklyn Bridge, just like twenty years ago, and will look you square in the eye, telling the God’s honest truth, straight to your face: “Sorry man, no knish.”
Yeah, come to think of it, I was there on Nine Eleven. We all were.
Ten-four.
![Ahmad_Shah_Massoud.jpg] (
)
Ahmad Shah Massoud (Dari/Pashto: احمد شاه مسعود; Persian pronunciation: [ʔæhmæd ʃɒːh mæsʔuːd] September 2, 1953 – September 9, 2001) was an Afghan politician and military commander.[4] He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime[5] until his assassination in 2001. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud
Summary:
The entire world is a suburb of New York City;
New York is a “state of mind” ;
The Twin Towers are a tuning fork;
WTC is abbreviated as FDNY
(extra credit) That cosmopolitan aroma you’re smelling, is last week’s garbage, piled up out on the sidewalk
(extra credit) Wo-Hop is open all night, every night, except Chinese New Year - cheap & delicious!
A collection of links to raw footage of Nine Eleven, along with a digital version of this article, is available at http://tinyurl.com/no-knish for the morbidly curious.
Genelle Guzman-McMillan on Surviving the September 11th Attack in NYC -
Last Survivor of 9/11: The Incredible Story of Genelle Guzman - https://historyofyesterday.com/last-survivor-of-9-11-the-incredible-story-of-genelle-guzman-dd056f16da9c
https://www.genelleguzmanmcmillan.com/
A 9/11 survivor's long journey from GROUND ZERO Saved only by acts of fate
It's painful for Rich Conte of Stowe to talk about what he experienced on September 11, 2001 as a New York City firefighter. Conte is the only one who survived from Engine 33's responding crew. RYAN MERCER/FREE PRESS
http://www.dgoodman.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Rich-Conte-BFP-9-8-12.pdf
William Rodríguez is a former janitor at the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001, attacks and was in the basement of the North Tower when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building. After the attacks he received several awards for heroism for helping in the evacuation of many survivors. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rodriguez
What Really happened on 9/11? - William Rodriguez -
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