9/11

I find nearly all public commemorations of 9/11 problematic.  Light on introspection, heavy on jingoism- what one of my Twitter follows refered to as the America, Fuck Yeah!-ificaton of a national tragedy, which was amplified into a global one by the panic-driven stampede of our national response.*

A fundamental rebuke to the weeping airbrushed eagle/9/11 Commemorative Plate & Medal crowd is found in this harrowing firsthand account of surviving the collapse of the towers.

Up to that day, I'd had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it's like to have a 110-story building that's been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it's part of my life. There are things I never thought I'd know that I now know.

It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day.

I was actually in a good mood. A couple of us were yukking it up in the men's room. We'd just started sharing the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center with Bank of America, and they'd put up a sign telling everyone to keep the bathroom clean. "Look at this," one of us said. "They move in and now they're giving us shit." It was about quarter to nine.

All of a sudden, there was the shift of an earthquake. People ask, "Did you hear a boom?" No. The way I can best describe it is that every joint in the building jolted. You ever been in a big old house when a gust of wind comes through and you hear all the posts creak? Picture that creaking being not a matter of inches but of feet. We all got knocked off balance. One guy burst out of a stall buttoning up his pants, saying, "What the fuck?" The flex caused the marble walls in the bathroom to crack.

* on cue, Roku just sent a 9/11 We Will Never Forget graphic out on their FB feed.