9/11 Twenty-Two Years Later
Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I’d just started working at Reuters News in Times Square. It was a beautiful, clear day with blue skies. I got my coffee and went to my desk on the 19th floor … and soon the commotion started. I called my boss who was in London and told him a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. That’s what we thought had happened. It didn’t take long to know what it really was: a passenger plane flying into one building, with another soon to come.
We could see the towers from a corner window in the newsroom. At some point we were told to draw the blinds and turn off the lights, in case more was coming. And now it’s 22 years later.
I don’t spend much time reminiscing, especially about such horrific events, but when I see what’s going on in the country now, how deep the chasms are, how furious and angry and on-the-verge-of-violence it all is, I can’t help thinking: they won. They turned us into a paranoid, enraged, self-hating nation of tribes that blame each other for the perceived end of it all, this imaginary America with its imaginary past and its imaginary future. We live in a perpetual “culture war” fed by fantasies of civil war, and revenge, and the satisfying smell of the defeated bodies of our enemies strewn at our feet.
What more could they have asked for, those terrorists? How much more completely could they have destroyed us than we are destroying ourselves? We’re constantly trying to “take our country back,” without admitting that the people we fight to take it back from is us. They won. And as long as we continue down this road of destruction that appears to have no exit, they will continue winning. “To the victor go the spoils.” No one ever said the victor had to be alive.