The New York skyline was white. I’m told the dust cloud was black if you were trapped inside it, but it looked pristine white on the news. The people we saw running for their lives covered in dust were white, as well, as if they were marble statues. Medics were pouring water on their faces to rinse their eyes, and the water left streaks of their normal flesh color on their cheeks, as if the statues were weeping– and some of them were, but most only looked dazed.
The newscasters weren’t allowed to show dead bodies, but they showed other things. They kept showing people leaning out the windows on the very top floor, waving for help. They showed a shot of a single woman’s shoe lying in the rubble– a shoe that had flown off of somebody’s foot as their bodies smashed on the pavement like ripe fruit. They showed another shot of the faces of people on the ground, watching, cringing, covering their eyes.
Some of the news cameras occasionally zoomed in on things falling off of the tower. They looked like unusually large sheets of paper, cascading down. It took awhile to realize tell that the things were really people– people holding hands and jumping together, people dangling from the windows and then letting go, people clinging to curtains and such things in an insane hope that they’d act as parachutes and break their fall.
Some of the videos picked up the occasional dull thud of a body hitting the ground, but they didn’t say what the sound was.
And then there were no towers at all.
I don’t remember how much of this I really saw the first time, at about ten o’clock on September Eleventh, 2001, and how much I saw as I re-watched the news footage later, again and again.
I watched it again recently. I started to notice that the people looked a little dated– some of their hairdos and outfits looked like what I’d call retro, like something out of the past. The phones they were holding to their ears looked old-fashioned. The cars lining the street were old as well.
2001 is in the past, now. A time where the world before 2001 was normal, is a time past. It’s a part of history. Whatever America was before– and I’m not saying I understood it, or that we were any good– is a part of history. The terrorists wanted to destroy America, and they did destroy that particular America, the one that existed in my mind and the minds of people I knew. Everything that happened after that: the strange belief, which lasted only a month, that America would be united from this day forward and never again squabble internally; the tens or hundreds of thousands of foreign people killed in wars so that Americans could feel safe as we had before, which didn’t work; the unchecked rise of this new face of the nationalism and xenophobia we’ve always had to some extent; the condemnation of anyone who wasn’t xenophobic as a bleeding heart– they are all history too. They are things we take for granted now. They’re something that used to be,or something that grew to be part of the scenery, part of the background, an establishing shot.
If you want to show an establishing shot of New York City now, you don’t show the Twin Towers. The Twin Towers are synonymous with disaster and tragedy, a sort of terrible joke on American naivete, an establishing shot for a nightmare that’s in many ways still ongoing. But they used to be something else.
If you can’t remember what it was like: you have to understand, we had no idea.
We ought to have, but we didn’t.
And what we are now started then. It came from so many places, so many different parts of our culture that ought to have been better but weren’t. But the situation you find yourself in now, the America you know, the thing you call “normal,” started then.
It used to be different, and then it wasn’t anymore.
(image via Wikimedia Commons)
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