You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A patient whose apartment terrace faced the Twin Towers wept as she tried to recount the horror of the 9/11 attack. We sat together, each of us immersed and reeling in our mutual struggle to grapple with the traumatic immensity of what we had both witnessed, only two weeks earlier.
The morning that I had heard the first news report that a “small plane” had crashed into the World Trade Center, I ran up to the roof of my building, where the towers were in full view, 10 blocks further downtown. Thick plumes of black smoke were billowing out of the upper floors of the North tower, a terrifying and ominous insult to the brilliant blue, cloudless sky of that morning. Ironically, it was the kind of weather pilots refer to as “severe clear,” unlimited visibility. I muttered, “An accident like this was inevitable. The buildings are just too high,” and a friend standing nearby, turned and said, “That’s no accident, that’s terrorism!”
Terrorism! The word itself felt like an assault, a piercing of consciousness. That word, and that catastrophic event, marked the end of an era, one of those catalytic, transitional moments in history that instantly created a “pre and post,” a before and after. September 11th, 2001 went from being an ordinary balmy, sparkling, blue-sky day, just a date, to a forever-after infamous and heinous killing of 2996 people. It became 9/11. And 9/11, the event, heralded terrorism as a new normal for America.
I stood on Greenwich Street in New York, incredulous, as I watched those towering, monolithic structures collapse, and the terrified and paralyzed crowd around me, screamed in helpless protest, “No!” holding up their arms, as if they could magically prevent the catastrophic downing of those buildings. And we instantly knew that we had been violently, shockingly, slammed into a new era. Our language changed. Ordinary words took on new charged meaning. The word “pancaking” entered our vocabulary. The buildings collapsed one floor on top of another until the