A Tuesday in September

It was a Tuesday morning like any other. And then it wasn't. I can still remember thinking a high rise must have been burning for so many fire trucks and ambulances to be howling down Broadway at barely nine in the morning. On entering the Strand Bookstore and punching in for my shift, I was drawn over to the buyer's counter, concerned by the worried expressions of my co-workers. Just after stepping up to them I heard the announcer on the radio say “the second tower has just been hit.” My coworkers had just barely had time to inform that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center when we were all confronted with a terrible fact: this was not an accident.

The rest of September 11th 2001 lives like a film in slow motion in my memory. I remember standing on 12th Street, looking down the long canyon of 5th Avenue, the towers burning and then, gone. I remember the ambulances rushing up Broadway and the smoke billowing out of them; I remember the white dust that covered every vehicle leaving the disaster site. I clearly recall sitting in Tompkins Square Park passing around a transistor radio, news of the Pentagon and a downed plane in Pennsylvania. Eventually the subway regained service and there was the trip back home to Crown Heights. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge the train went silent as the horror of Southern Manhattan came into view: the looming absence of the towers and the long black trail of smoke bleeding across the Hudson River and Brooklyn.

I was twenty and naive and even I knew something had changed irrevocably. Then the Saber rattling started. The rush to war, the erosion of liberties and the charges of giving aid and comfort to the enemy if one dared speak for peace. Those were lonely years, opposing the War on Terror. Both parties came together, waving their flags and screaming for vengeance in a state of pure bloodlust. Now, twenty-two years later, the US charges activists as terrorists while continuing to militarize the police. Twenty-two years and still the war lingers out of sight, metastasized and septic, the cost in human lives unknown, unconcerned as the US with human life in general, and Muslim lives in particular.

The real danger since 9/11 has never been terrorists or terrorism, the real threat, the real danger has always been the erosion of democratic institutions by those charged with preserving them, and in an age where an activist can be branded a terrorist and terrorists can disappear into prisons without charge or trial, it would seem that the goal was never to protect us by creating such arbitrary beyond the law machinations for dealing with terrorism, the goal was always to open an eternal gray area, where anyone can be stripped of their humanity and disappeared. The United States Congress has built that landscape, and this summer in Georgia, activists trying to protect a forest are showing us exactly how the US plans to handle rebellion against our own extinction.