Hey all,
My impressions.
Peace,
Preston
WTC Attack: Impressions of one Manhattan resident
By Preston Peet
The sense of disbelief I feel when I look out my window while typing reminds me of the smoke plume still rising from the downtown NYC skyline tonight, nearly 60 hours after the first jetliner plowed into the World Trade Center: intangible and hard to grasp, but oppressive and overwhelming just the same. The reality of the Towers was firm, an everyday thing. They were always within view from just about anywhere on the island, but that reality has been eradicated permanently. It is hard to grasp even now, but the silence of the streets outside, the stench of smoke wafting in, and that huge empty hole in the city skyline all slap me with reminders. The World Trade Center is no more.
Just before 10AM Tuesday morning a message was left on our answering machine. "Please call, I’m worried about you in the city," said my girlfriend’s mother. Wondering what she was talking about, my girlfriend got out of bed and strolled to the front room to play back the message, flipping on the tv as she did. Seeing the WTC burning on the screen, she leaned over and took a look out the window. When we moved into this apartment last year, we’d both commented on how great a view we had of the WTC. She called me with an urgency that brought me running. Tower 2 had just fallen, the resultant cloud of dust and smoke nearly obscuring the fact from our window, but Tower 1 was clearly on fire like a giant torch, flames visible through unfathomable, gaping, jagged holes multiple stories large way up high in the sides of the Tower.
Already, as I threw on some clothes, my mind was trying to wrap itself around what was happening, imagining how odd it was going to look with just the one Tower standing. The tv was blaring alarming reports of a plane, or as I subsequently found out 2 planes, striking the Towers, of another hitting the Pentagon, of a car bomb outside the US State Department, a fire on the Washington Mall, and up to a total of 8 jets out of contact with air traffic controllers and possibly hijacked by knife-wielding terrorists. President Bush was speaking at a school I attended in my hometown of Sarasota and it was my birthday. The whole thing was just too surreal, but it got even more so very quickly.
Grabbing a camera, I tore up the stairs to the roof, where the unobstructed view from just south of Houston Street allowed me to begin snapping photos. The crystal clear blue sky had a roiling black wound on it spreading to the South, ugly black smoke that rose into the air from the one remaining Tower, and the empty hole beside it, pouring East across the water to cover Staten Island. The scene was something from a dream, a nightmare, so utterly beyond anything that I ever expected to be witness to that I could only stare, snapping away with my camera, thinking of the people on what I now knew to be two planes diving into the Towers, one after the other. Another tenant who witnessed the second jet slam into Tower 2 described it to me, the horror etched on her face as she related seeing the second plane deliberately crash headlong at high speed into the side of the Tower then explode in a huge ball of flame and debris. After a few minutes upstairs, people from all around me on my roof and many of the surrounding buildings began screaming, "Oh God, there it goes!" Quickly raising my camera, I took pictures as Tower 1 cracked, broke and began to crumble in what appeared to me from my vantage point slow motion onto downtown Manhattan below. Then all I could say over and over was, "those poor people, all those poor people," as a writhing cloud of hell on Earth covered the lower part of Manhattan like a living animal, obliterating many of the remaining high-rise buildings from view.
I’m grateful I didn’t witness the people falling from the upper floors where I stood, and even more so that I don’t live south of Canal Street, now the northern border of a 5-mile crime scene and disaster area cordoned off by police and national guard units. Until Wednesday night, we couldn’t even smell the smoke here. But we sure saw the people fleeing on foot north through Manhattan that morning. Avenue A had more pedestrian traffic than I’ve seen in almost 8 years in NYC. Most had paper masks covering their faces or hanging around their necks with their loosened ties and collars, many were covered in soot and dust, and all had an eerie, somber air to them, tense and confused. Military jets were crisscrossing periodically overhead, adding to the air of siege that permeated the city.
Walking across the island a few hours later, seeing the pall on the lower horizon each time we crossed an avenue affording us a view of the sky formerly hidden by the WTC, it felt like being on the largest movie set imaginable. The massive destruction and the audacity of the attacks both here and on the Pentagon, the loss of life estimated into the 10s of thousands were all so chilling, so abominable, it was almost to much to register, and still is. The scenes of family and loved ones cramming the hospitals and recovery sites in one of the largest, most modern cities in the US and World, hoping beyond hope to find lost loved ones who somehow managed to survive two 110-story Towers, and another 47-floor tower all collapsing on top of them, are heart wrenching, threatening to rip tears from my eyes as each fiancé and mother, sister, and cousin all appear gazing forlornly into the television cameras, plaintively holding out their photocopied, phone-numbered pieces of paper with pictures of loved ones. Is this how the victims of US bombings around the world feel when they begin to realize their neighbors, friends, family and loved ones aren’t coming home again?
Though I am wracked with emotions and feelings for all the people, fellow Americans and foreigners alike who lost their lives in these horrific acts, I cannot help but think of US actions on other shores, in other countries, the support given by the US to regimes that slaughter thousands of both their own citizens and their neighbors using US weapons, training and funding. I cannot shake the feeling that anyone who would climb into a jet loaded with people and fuel and crash it suicidally into a crowed city must have felt they’d had a valid grievance with the US, one that could not be discussed in any sort of rational, reasoned way. Jealousy of Freedom and the American Way does not drive men and women to kill thousands and thousands of people along with themselves in coordinated terrorist plots. Anger would though, anger possibly at US consumptions, at US aggressions, at US arrogance, at US foreign policies that put American business and military interests before any consideration of other countries and citizens even within their own borders. It is difficult to hear President Bush talk about going after countries that harbor terrorists, knowing that the US trains, supports and harbors terrorists as a matter of course. As much sympathy as I feel for the dead and those left behind, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen images of bombings and felt similar feelings, though it is the first time ever it’s been my city and my country bombed. I can’t shake the feeling that it is the lack of consciousness of many US politicians and the US citizenry too apathetic to pay attention to what our government and military/industrial types export around the world that brought this horror show down upon us, not the lack of HUMINT, (though it surely is that as well).
NYC is beginning to return to a semblance of normality north of Canal Street, but the damage done to Manhattan, the Pentagon, and the American psyche is still impossible to gauge. It’s sure to grow worse before it gets better. The heroism of the rescue efforts of those Americans currently clearing the rubble at the WTC and the Pentagon illustrates the best in human behavior and spirit. But if we as US citizens do not take a long hard look at our relationship with the rest of the world, if we allow our government to continue to strike at yet more foreign civilian populations while further restricting basic American civil liberties in the name of security, we can rest assured that more death and destruction, more loss and pain, will land on our shores. If we in the US don’t take steps to mend the rift between us and so much of the rest of the World, if we indiscriminately bomb another country or countries in retaliation as we have in past responses to terrorist attacks, we will not be fixing any problems, we will only escalate the violence and hate. As I’ve repeatedly seen expressed in a Gandhi quote today, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." We reap what we sow.
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.
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