I was 6 years old when I first remember being exposed to the terrors of the 9/11 attacks.
I was sitting in the upstairs loft at my grandma’s house with my dad, watching Philippe Petit walk a tightrope between the two towers.
“It’s too bad those buildings aren’t standing anymore,” my dad had said.
“Those two tall ones? Both of them? They’re gone?” My little brain couldn’t comprehend how two tremendously tall buildings just disappeared. My dad turned on a documentary of the attacks and I watched in horror as the planes hit the towers, men and women jumped out of windows, even more terrified when the buildings collapsed, absorbed into a giant cloud of smoke.
I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t a fictional movie I was watching. These people weren’t paid actors who played dead and revived as soon as the director yelled cut. These were real people, who had kissed their husbands, wives, parents, children goodbye that morning as they left for work, never coming home for dinner. I didn’t understand
I turned from the TV and looked at my dad, who was visibly shaken up even then, six years after the attack.
“But why, dad? Why would they do that?”
***
Flash forward 11 years later and I find myself at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, still asking myself the same question, but understanding more of the complexity behind it all. I now understood the tension between the US and Middle East, the work that went on inside the World Trade towers, and the terrorist group responsible for the attacks.
The museum itself had a kind of reverence to it. Not the kind of reverence you feel at a church service. More of a somber reverence, if there can be such a thing.
The first thing you see is a large photograph of the New York City skyline, taken only minutes before the first plane hit the North Tower. It’s a pretty, serene photo taken on a seemingly normal day. People made their usual commute to work, parents packed lunches for their children’s first day of classes, for many it was a regular day. Little did they know that 120, maybe 180, seconds later, the world would change drastically.
“On that day, everyone’s sense of history changed. Going forward, there would always be the time before 9/11, and the time after.”
In Memoriam, an exhibit honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed, tells the heartbreaking stories that remind us of our humanity. Their photos line the walls all around. The youngest killed was two and a half, the oldest eighty-five. Those killed came from over 90 countries, with different religious beliefs and ethnicities. Tragedy stops for no one, it seems. Among those killed were Calvin Joseph Gooding, a thirty-eight-year old trader with an office on the 104th floor and a wife who was eight months pregnant, and Joseph Gerard Leavey, a fireman who made it to the 78th floor before the building collapsed, leaving three children behind.
The Ground Zero exhibit was the most haunting, eerie, yet touching part of the memorial. A loud chirping sound plays throughout the room. The sound emanates from a Personal Alert Safety System device, or a man-down beeper. The beeper sounds a high-pitched alarm if a firefighter doesn’t move for thirty seconds. The sound is nearly deafening.
On the other side of the room, a video of lower Manhattan plays. The footage was filmed by composer Willian Basinski during the last hours of daylight on September 11th, 2001. The beeping of the alert devices are still apparent, but faded. The soundtrack at this point is from a piece Basinski digitized while it physically deteriorated just before 9/11. It was ironic, listening to a deteriorating tape while watching buildings collapse in a deteriorating world.
I spent four hours in the museum, and I could have spent more if my heart could have taken it.
***
photo via
“A great people has been moved to defend a great nation.
Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”
I still ask myself the same question I had as a six-year-old.
Why?
It’s not right. It’s not justified. And I still wonder why.
photo via
Further reading:
The Day the World Came to Town by Jim DeFede