To me, September 11, 2001, feels like yesterday. Correction: It’s more vivid than yesterday, because I can’t remember what I ate yesterday, but I can still taste the toxic World Trade Center smoke and dust given the right trigger. It overwhelms me on the anniversary date; when the sky is a particular shade of blue; when I hear a too-low plane or an ear-splitting metallic clang.
By the way, you didn’t have to be directly in the cloud of dust or on/near “Ground Zero” to smell and taste that dust. I lived more than 80 blocks away from the WTC and for weeks, that smell and taste hung heavy in the air. I remember saying that the air had to be dangerous despite the government reassurances to the contrary. My reasoning was, “Even if there were that much vitamin C in the air, it would be poisonous.” I mean, come on. If you can see, smell, and taste a foreign substance in the air – and feel the grime it leaves on both indoor and outdoor surfaces – it’s got to be bad. It’s no surprise that the number of deaths from post-9/11 illnesses are more than double the number of deaths recorded on 9/11 itself. (U.S. News & World Report says, “Representatives for more than 9,000 people who died after 9/11 have filed claims with the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, and more than 6,000 of those have received compensation so far.”)
Anyway, considering how present that day remains to me, I was startled when someone I have known for a couple of years – and have grown close to – asked, “Hey, where were you on 9/11?” Fifteen years ago, the experience was such an integral part of my life story that anyone who knew me well wouldn’t have to ask. Even a stranger’s small-talk question about my career was likely to bring it up. But a quarter of a century later, the years 2001 to 2005 don’t usually come up in conversation, even when I’m talking about work. If I were writing a resume now, those years would be one line at most. Ancient history.
But I kind of want to answer my friend’s question. The shortest answer to “Where were you on 9/11? is: Across the street in the World Financial Center (now known as Brookfield Place). For those who know the neighborhood, I was at 200 Vesey Street.
As to why I was there: I was the managing editor for e-commerce for Lehman Brothers, the investment bank, and I was in Lehman’s offices early to phone in to a meeting on the 40th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. I was supposed to go in person, but I decided it would be too boring. (One person from Lehman died that day.)
If you want my full story, you can find it on this blog, albeit in bits and pieces. As I reread my old posts today, I was stunned by how much I didn’t say in some of them. I puzzled over this a while, before I remembered the survivor’s guilt that prevented me from writing a cohesive story here. Even in conversation, for years, I said, “I was lucky; nothing happened to me” – although I would tell the whole story in detail if pushed for more information or when MrB started telling part of our shared story. Then I’d want to correct him, of course. But I definitely perceived my story as “small” and that telling it, especially in writing, would somehow take away from the people who truly suffered. I mean, I spent two years constantly visiting corporate memorial sites for their employees and obsessively worrying about these strangers’ families. Plus I personally knew many people who fled the Towers as bodies rained down; others who were caught in the initial dust cloud (MrB and his colleague who ultimately died from that exposure in 2020); people who lost their homes and possessions; and, of course, anyone who lost someone that day, in New York, D.C., or Pennsylvania. Those were the really important stories.
This seems wild to me now. I suppose it shows some kind of progress that I now think it would have been much easier – and a lot less weird – to tell my story in one shot rather than over a period of years. Everything’s here, but you have to work for it, so if you’re really motivated, here’s a guide to my personal 9/11 story:
- In 2007, the year I started blogging, I gave the bare minimum information. Basically, MrB and I both worked across the street from the World Trade Center. I was able to evacuate north, but he was forced to go south, towards the water, and that’s how he ended up in the cloud of debris. I also wrote about a stuffed cow.
- My 2008 post “Laughing While Crying” provided more detail about evacuating the area, and mused about how certain garments can be ridiculed even during emergencies. Also, the stuffed cow came back.
- In 2009, I wrote about the “other” Wendy Brandes and how my friends ended up talking to her. She’s always part of my story.
- My 2010 post, “The Devil Is in the Details,” seems bizarre to me now because I wrote about key moments while calling them “minor memories.”
- In 2011, I finally wrote in detail about watching people jumping from the buildings. It’s about halfway through the post.
- It took me until 2014 to mention that I was the one who called MrB and told him about the “explosion” in the World Trade Center. He was the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and my call kicked off the effort by MrB and his top editors to get Journal folks to a New Jersey office. The Journal published on September 12, and that coverage won a Pulitzer. MrB didn’t go to New Jersey and all the journalists worked for hours believing that he was dead. Dean Rotbart wrote an oral history about this, called “September Twelfth.”
Do I need to write my story from beginning to end in a single post for posterity? I’m not sure. I’m just so shocked that I never did that. This morning, I truly thought I was going to link to one old post and say, “Here’s my story” and then get to my real topic, which is my rage and anxiety about the deluge of 9/11 propaganda. It’s one thing to have memorial services that comfort the survivors – I would never take issue with that – but I loathe the hours of coverage and millions of words spilled throughout the day that present 9/11 as THE great tragedy in a country that absolutely does not care about mass death in less spectacular circumstances, either at home and in other countries. (No need to raise your hand and say “I’m a decent person who cares.” I know you’re out there. This is a larger-society issue.) I wrote about this in 2020, 2021, and 2023 and I’m not going to repeat every line of those posts now. I’ll just post this September 11, 2020, headline from the Intercept for the third time because it makes my point in relatively few words.
You can replace that Covid statistic with the stat of your choice, such as the 4.5 – 4.7 million people, largely civilians, estimated by Brown University to have died in America’s post-9/11 wars. (Trillions of dollars moved from public funds to the private sector thanks to those wars.) Or you can replace the Covid stat with the half a million people who have been killed by guns in the U.S. since 9/11. You can insert the more than 70,000 Palestinians killed by Israel with U.S. funds and weapons. (One thousand were killed this year during a “ceasefire.”) You can count the thousands of people locked in for-profit concentration camps by ICE. Remember, ICE IS a product of 9/1. It was formed in 2003 and now has a budget that’s bigger all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, thanks to both Democrats and Republicans. There’s a direct line from 9/11 propaganda to the masked ICE thugs committing extrajudicial murders in the street and to people dying from medical neglect and worse behind the walls of GEO Group- and CoreCivic-run prisons.
I passionately disliked today’s flag waving and the solemn God-bless-America faces on people who have ZERO personal connection to that day – they didn’t work or live in NYC, D.C., or Pennsylvania; they didn’t lose anyone; they didn’t momentarily fear they lost someone; they weren’t on any of the grounded planes. There are too many ways to have a personal connection, so I can’t list them all, but watching it on TV was not the same. This terrific Instagram post by Amy Elliott about what it felt like in NYC is a must-read. (Amy, thank you for reposting it at my request!)
Here’s a quote from a Facebook post that nails my discomfort with the day. Hollow is exactly how I felt today.
The incessant commemorations of 9/11 ring more hollow to me every year. Everyone here performatively mourns the lives lost in a singular attack, while spending the last 25 years (and decades before that) making this kind of terror a normal way of life for people throughout the global south. It’s a level of cognitive dissonance (and hypocrisy) that just makes me roll my eyes and wonder what we’re even doing here. Us Americans can’t handle even a tiny fraction of what we routinely put so much of the world through everyday.
Speaking of things I dislike, I’ll include my own 9/11 10th-anniversary post, back when I believed that the First Amendment meant something, and that corporate media and big institutions like universities and hospitals would resist fascism rather than cave immediately. While I repeatedly mention the USA’s failures in that post, I had blind and even arrogant faith in our “ideals.” I’ve changed a lot since then.
At least one good quality has stayed with me for a whole quarter century. Sleeveless-turtleneck-hater Mel reminded me today. She had the dubious pleasure of working for me and a guy at Lehman. I called her after the first plane hit and told her not to leave our building, because the debris falling off the World Trade Center could be dangerous, or there could be a secondary bombing of evacuees on the ground. Then the second plane hit and I was like, “All bets are off! Time to go!” I called Mel back. As she recalls:
I’m proud to say that even back in the day, I was like “Fuck a (second) boss, save yourself!” Remember that, folks! People died on 9/11 because their bosses kept them at work in the second tower. More people have died since then of 9/11-caused illnesses because their bosses had them working in offices downtown mere days after the attacks. In an emergency, don’t listen to “company man” bosses! Listen to the “fuck this company” women, especially the ones who keep World Trade Center matches for 25+ years.
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