The Real 9/11: Citizens Succeeded, Institutions Failed
I wrote this for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, drawing on my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; it felt right to revise and reissue for this twenty-fifth anniversary.
A quarter century ago, 2,600 people lost their lives in Manhattan, and then several million people lost their story. The al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat New Yorkers. It destroyed the buildings, contaminated the region, killed thousands, and disrupted the global economy, but it most assuredly did not conquer the citizenry. They were only defeated when their resilience was stolen from them by clichés, by the invisibility of what they accomplished that extraordinary morning, and by the very word "terrorism," which suggests that they, or we, were all terrified. The distortion, even obliteration, of what actually happened was a necessary precursor to launching the obscene response that culminated in a war on Iraq, a war we lost, and the loss of civil liberties and democratic principles that went with it.
Only We Can Terrorize Ourselves
For this twenty-fifth anniversary of that terrible day, let's remember what actually happened: When the planes became missiles and the towers became torches and then shards and clouds of dust, many were afraid, but few if any panicked, other than the President who was far away from danger. The military failed to respond promptly, even though the Pentagon itself was attacked, and the only direct resistance that day came from inside Flight 93, which went down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington, thanks to the valiant and quickly improvised response of the passengers and crew to the hijackers.
Flights 11 and 175 struck the towers. Hundreds of thousands of people rescued each other and themselves, evacuating the buildings and the area, helped in the first minutes, then hours, by those around them. Both PS 150, an elementary school, and the High School for Leadership and Public Service were successfully evacuated -- without casualties. In many cases, teachers took students home with them.
A spontaneously assembled flotilla of boats, ranging from a yacht appropriated by policemen to a historic fireboat, evacuated 300,000 to 500,000 people from lower Manhattan, a nautical feat on the scale of the British evacuation of an army from Dunkirk in the early days of World War II; the fleet, that is, rescued in a few hours as many people as the British fleet rescued in days (under German fire admittedly, but then New York's ferry operators and pleasure-boat captains were steering into that toxic cloud on a day when many thought more violence was to come).
Adam Mayblum, who walked down from the 87th floor of the north tower with some of his coworkers, wrote on the Internet immediately afterward: "They failed in terrorizing us. We were calm. If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves. If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite. This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States."
We failed, however, when we let our own government and media do what that small band from the other side of the Earth could not. Some of us failed, that is, for there were many kinds of response, and some became more radical, more committed, more educated. Mark Fichtel, the president of the New York Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange, who scraped his knees badly that morning of September 11th when he was knocked over in a fleeing crowd, was helped to his feet by "a little old lady." He nonetheless had his Exchange up and running the next day, and six months later quit his job, began studying Islam, and then teaching about it. Principal Ada Rosario-Dolch, who on the morning of September 11th set aside concern for her sister Wendy Alice Rosario Wakeford (who died in the towers) to evacuate her high school two blocks away, went to Afghanistan in 2004 to dedicate a school in Herat, Afghanistan, that included a garden memorializing Wakeford.
In a Dust Storm of Altruism
Hollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos. Most of us believe this, even though it is a slander against the species, an obliteration of what actually happens, and a crippling blow to our ability to prepare for disasters. [This cliche has ceased to be so present in entertainment and news coverage since I wrote this, but it was widely believed about the people of New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina and the reason behind the cruel failure of response in that disaster.]
Hollywood likes this view because without stupid, helpless people to save, or wicked people to brutalize, heroes, their kind of heroes, action heroes wielding violence as a badge of hypermasculinity, become unnecessary. Or rather, without them, it turns out that we are all heroes, even if distinctly unstereotypical ones like that elderly woman who got Fichtel back on his feet. Governments like the grim view for a similar reason: it justifies their existence as repressive, controlling, hostile forces, rather than collaborators with brave and powerful citizenries. The news media tend to like this version too because it offers conventional heroes, usually men in uniform, and villains, rather than a civil society that takes care of itself, and the conventional versions of what happened that day lean hard on firefighters and police. Hundreds of uniformed city workers showed up; they were brave; but people largely rescued themselves.
And the firefighters were lambs to the slaughter. The great majority of the casualties were people trapped above the fires, including more than 1300 above the 91st floor of the north tower. Had the firemen who valiantly marched up the stairs while thousands were pouring down had better radio communications equipment, far fewer than 341 of them might have perished. Had the people in charge of the buildings ordered evacuations immediately rather than urging people to stay put in the south tower, more rescuers and workers might have survived.
Far more people could have died on September 11th if New Yorkers had not remained calm, had not helped each other out of the endangered buildings and the devastated area, had not reached out to pull people from the collapsing buildings and the dust cloud. The population of the towers was lower than usual that morning, because it was an election day and many were voting before heading to work; it seems emblematic that so many were spared because they were exercising their democratic powers. Others exercised their empathy and altruism.
Here's how John Guilfoy, a young man who'd been a college athlete, recalled the 9/11 moment: "I remember looking back as I started running, and the thickest smoke was right where it was, you know, a few blocks away, and thinking that, like, whoever's going to be in that is just going to die. There's no way you could – you're going to suffocate, and it was coming at us. I remember just running, people screaming. I was somewhat calm, and I was little bit faster than my colleagues, so I had to stop and slow up a little bit and wait for them to make sure we didn't lose each other."
Had he been in a disaster movie, he would have been struggling in some selfish, social-darwinist way to survive at others' expense, or he would simply have panicked, as we are all supposed to do in disaster. In the reality of September 11th, in a moment of supreme danger, his sense of solidarity, not even to the people nearest and dearest to him but to his coworkers, proved stronger than his self-interest in survival. I'm still staggered by his unselfconscious account; I still choke up when I talk about it.
Many New Yorkers that day committed similar feats of solidarity at great risk. In fact, in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research A Paradise Built in Hell, I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the conclude that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness.
A young man from Pakistan, Usman Farman, told of how he fell down and a Hasidic Jewish man stopped, looked at his pendant's Arabic inscription and then,"with a deep Brooklyn accent he said 'Brother if you don't mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let's get the hell out of here.' He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren't for him I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris." A blind newspaper vendor was walked to safety by two women, and a third escorted her to her home in the Bronx.
John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant who worked on the sixty-ninth floor of thenorth tower, was carried down all those flights of stairs to safety by ten of his coworkers in relays, using an evacuation chair designed to skid down the stairs that had been provided after the earlier attack. One of the firefighters in Jules and Gédéon Naudet’s documentary about 9/11 recalls people saying to the ascending firefighters, “What are you doing? Get out.”
Errol Anderson, a recruiter with the fire department, was caught outside in that dust storm. He recalls, "For a couple of minutes I heard nothing. I thought I was either dead and was in another world, or I was the only one alive. I became nervous and panicky, not knowing what to do, because I couldn't see... About four or five minutes later, while I was still trying to find my way around, I heard the voice of a young lady. She was crying and saying, 'Please, Lord, don't let me die. Don't let me die.' I was so happy to hear this lady's voice. I said, 'Keep talking, keep talking, I'm a firefighter, I'll find you by the response of where you are.' Eventually we met up with each other and basically we ran into each other's arms without even knowing it."
She held onto his belt and eventually several other people joined them to form a human chain. He helped get them to the Brooklyn Bridge before returning to the site of the collapsed buildings. That bridge became a pedestrian escape route for tens of thousands. For hours, a river of people poured across it. On the far side, Hasidic Jews handed out bottles of water to the refugees. Hordes of volunteers from the region, and within days the nation, converged on lower Manhattan, offering to weld, dig, nurse, cook, clean, hear confessions, listen – and did all of those things.
New Yorkers triumphed on that day twenty-five years ago. They triumphed in calm, in strength, in generosity, in improvisation, in kindness. Nor was this something specific to that time or place: San Franciscans during the great earthquake of 1906, Londoners during the Blitz in World War II, New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina hit – in fact most people in most disasters in most places have behaved with just this sort of grace and dignity.
The Bush Administration did not want a heroic public. They wanted a cowed, obedient public and they set about creating one, telling people to stay home, to fear their neighbors and report them for anything suspicious, to go shopping (stupid shopping bags with American flags and "America: Open for Business" were everywhere while other things, such as civil liberties were being closed down), to accept a loss of those liberties in the name of wartime patriotism (and we are still suffering from that sabotage of our rights), to demonize Muslims abroad and at home (a wave of stupid violence against Muslims, and people who looked Muslim to haters, and even Sikhs erupted in the wake of the propaganda war). The first enemy they had to conquer was us, and in the years that followed people lost their jobs in heartland America for speaking out against the wars.
The administration wanted us to pretend that it was the military that protects us when the military was effectively useless that day, to pretend that rather than the act of a small terrorist sect this was an act of war that justified invading Afghanistan and then Iraq, which conveniently had a lot of oil that the administration (headed by oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney) redirected to their cronies, as Trump has with Venezuela's oil. The government was reorganized to create the Department of Homeland Security, and the Third-Reich tones of that word homeland was noted at the time, and to create ICE. Many of the abuses in the present have their roots in how the Bush Administration took 9/11 as license to impose their authoritarian, repressive, exploitative version of government on us.
It Could Have Been Different
Imagine what else could have sprung from that morning twenty-five years ago. Imagine if the collapse of those towers had not been followed by such a blast of stereotypes, lies, distortions, and fear propaganda that served the agenda of the Bush administration while harming the rest of us – Americans, Iraqis, Afghans, and so many others, for people from 90 nations died in the attacks that day and probably those from many more nations survived at what came to be called Ground Zero.
Not long ago I talked to Roberto Sifuentes, a Chicano performance artist who was then living in New York. Like many New Yorkers, he still marvels at that brief, almost utopian moment of opening in the midst of tragedy, when everyone wanted to talk about meaning, about foreign policy, about history, and did so in public with strangers. It was a moment of passionate engagement with the biggest questions and with one another. On a few occasions, Sifuentes was threatened and nearly attacked for having approximately the same skin tone as a middle-easterner, but he was also moved by the tremendous opening of that moment, the great public dialogue that had begun, and he took part in it with joy.
In five years of investigation and in my own encounter with the San Francisco Bay Area's Loma Prieta earthquake 20 years ago, I've found that disasters are often moments of strange joy. My friend Kate Joyce, then a 19-year-old living in New Mexico, had landed in New York on the very morning of September 11, 2001, and spent the next several days in Union Square, the park-like plaza at 14th Street that became a regular gathering point.
She relished the astonishing forum that Union Square became in those days when we had a more perfect union:"We spoke passionately of the contemporary and historical conflicts, contradictions and connections affecting our lives," she wrote me later."We stayed for hours, through the night, and into the week riveted and expressive, in mourning and humbled, and in the ecstasy of a transformative present." Such conversations took place everywhere.
We had that more perfect union, and then we let them steal it.
Many people's impulse was to remain open-minded in the face of horror, to rethink our foreign policy, to try to grasp the real nature of the attack by that small band which was so obviously not an act of war. Such a response would have had to recognize that many were killed or widowed or orphaned on that September 11th , but none were defeated. Not that day. It would have had to recognize that such events are immeasurably terrible, but neither so rare as we Americans like to imagine, nor insurmountable. (Since 9/11, far more have been killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, the 2008 Burma typhoon, and of course the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Congo, among other events. More in this country have, in fact, died of domestic violence [as of 2009] since that day.)
After the 9/11 storm struck, the affected civilians in New York were seen as victims; after Katrina, those in New Orleans were portrayed as brutes. In both cities, the great majority of affected people were actually neither helpless nor savage; they were something else -- they were citizens, if by that word we mean civic engagement rather than citizenship status. In both places ordinary people were extraordinarily resourceful, generous, and kind, as were some police officers, firefighters, rescue workers, and a very few politicians. In both cases, the majority of politicians led us astray. All I would have wanted in that September moment, though, was politicians who stayed out of the way, and people who were more suspicious of the news and the newsmakers.
The media, too, stepped between us and the event, failing us with their stock of clichés about war and heroes, their ready adoption of the delusional notion of a "war on terror," their refusal to challenge the administration as it claimed that somehow the Saudi-spawned, fundamentalist al-Qaeda was linked to the secularist Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and that we should fear mythical Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction." Rarely did they mention that we had, in fact, been bombing Iraq without interruption since 1991.
After 9/11, it could all have been different, profoundly different. And if it had, there would have been no children imprisoned without charges or release dates in the Guantanamo gulag in Cuba; there would have been no unmanned drones slaughtering wedding parties in the rural backlands of Afghanistan or the Iraqi desert; there would have been no soldiers returning to the U.S. with two or three limbs missing or their heads and minds grievously damaged (there were already 320,000 traumatic brain injuries to soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan by early 2008, according to the RAND Corporation); there would not have been a next round of American deaths – 4,334 in Iraq, 786 in Afghanistan to date [as of 2009]; there would have been no trillion dollars taken from constructive projects to fatten the corporations of war; no extreme corrosion of the Bill of Rights, no usurpation of powers by the executive branch. Perhaps.
We Are the Monument
It could all have been different. It's too late now, but not too late, never too late, to change how we remember and commemorate this event and that other great landmark of the Bush era, Hurricane Katrina, and so prepare for disasters to come. New York has its pillars of light and readings of names for the anniversary of 9/11, but it seems to lack any invitation to the citizenry to feel its own power and prepare for the next calamity. For there will be next times for a great many cities and towns in this country and elsewhere. New Yorkers could gather in Union Square and elsewhere to remember what happened, really remember, remember that the heroes weren't necessarily men, or in uniform, but were almost everyone everywhere that day.
They could open their hearts and minds to discuss mourning, joy, death, violence, power, weakness, truth and lies, as they did that week. They could consider what constitutes safety and security, what else this country could be, and what its foreign and energy policies have to do with these things. They could walk the streets together to demonstrate that New York is still a great city, whose people were not frightened into going into hiding or flight from public and urban life. They could more consciously and ceremoniously do what New Yorkers, perhaps best of all Americans, do every day: coexist boldly and openly in a great mixture of colors, nationalities, classes, and opinions, daring to speak to strangers and to live in public.
The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be.
