9/11 Five Years On

Everyone recalls that morning five years ago. I was sitting at my desk in Maine  when the first plane hit the World Trade Center.  I did not know then that the lead terrorist – Mohammed Atta – had begun his terrible journey a few hours earlier just a few miles from where I was sitting at the tiny Portland, Maine Jetport. The rest of the morning was a series of frantic phone calls ensuring that family and coworkers in New York City and Washington DC were safe.  Almost immediately I started receiving messages from friends and colleagues in Germany and around the world expressing sympathy and grief.

The world changed for everyone those first few days following the 9/11 attack. James Carroll, I think, explains it best in a moving piece in today’s Boston Globe.

"What did we see? Not merely the end of the majestic towers, although their majesty was essential to what we saw. Not merely the mortality of those men and women whose bodies could be glimpsed in free fall (hemlines and neckties fluttering), although their mortality was absolute. We saw the stunning courage of a legion of heroes, rushing right before our eyes into selfless jeopardy, and we saw, finally, how such heroism was futile. In that destruction, we saw the destruction of the mainspring of meaning and hope — not the clash of civilization, but the end of it. This was more than a sense of individual mortality, the sure knowledge of a coming death that each one carries. We humans live with that by assuming the open-ended continuation of other lives, our children and their children — on into the indefinite future. But on 9/11, we saw the future itself as mortal.

In that vision, all that ordinarily separates humans was instantly ash. With the future ripped away from us, there was only the present. For a moment, we stopped struggling against time, and entered its most sovereign province, also known as providence."

Of course, what happened in the five years since 9/11/01 has been a nightmare from which we have yet to awaken. Today I grieve for the victims of that day, and for the tens of thousands of victims of the savage retribution that followed.