How 9/11 Should Be Remembered: The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People,

Current affairs

How 9/11 Should Be Remembered: The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, 9/11's Living Monuments

posted September 10, 2009 2:38 pm

As for myself, I was on my bedroom floor that morning most undramatically exercising when my wife called to tell me that something was happening. By then, TV cameras were already focused on the first punctured tower and, remembering tales of the B-25 that had hit the Empire State Building in 1945, I assumed I was watching a horrifying accident. Another friend, a rare North American who remembered the first 9/11 -- that day in 1973 when Salvador Allende, the Chilean president, was overthrown and murdered in a U.S.-backed military coup -- thought it might be Chilean payback.

Any half-plausible idea was, for a while, possible. History hadn't set. The Bush administration, in disarray, hadn't yet hijacked the day or the country. September 11th, still being lived, hadn't been renamed "Patriot Day." There was, as yet, no Department of Homeland Security, no Patriot Act. No one had been rounded up. No wars had been launched.

As for New Yorkers, those of us not making our way out of -- or into -- the danger zone were on the phone checking on loved ones, listening to rumors, or outside in the streets, talking to each other, wondering while the sirens wailed. It was a memorably terrible moment, but not, in fact, a nightmare of fear; nor would New York ever, as far as I could tell, find itself in the grip of blind revenge as, it seemed, so much of the country would soon be. Not so long after 9/11, for instance, two New Yorkers I know -- one had been close indeed to the collapsing towers -- headed for Afghanistan, not armed to kill but to help.

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