Remembering and Forgetting

There was beautiful weather as I walked the few blocks from my apartment at 140th and Broadway to my job at Jackie Robinson Park (the site of the old Polo Grounds) that September 11. And by beautiful I mean 70 degrees, bright and sunny, zero humidity, a slight breeze which after a stagnant New York summer means relief anf joy that the seasons are finally changing. I was looking forward to my day, to giving a morning training, finishing up some paperwork, and then going to vote in my first primary election in New York. I arrived at the park's recreation center to give my training in job skills to a group of welfare-to-work recipients. as I was starting the training, one of my coworkers, a manager at the center, pulled me out of the session to show me what was on TV.



On a local news channel we saw live images of smoke billowing from one of the World Trade Center towers and they kept replaying the images of a plane plowing into the tower. At first I thought, "wow, what a horrible accident," but then we saw another plane crash into the second tower, got reports that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington, DC and that a fourth plane was somewhere up in the air unaccounted for... and so the slow realization that something was amiss. Soon, the towers collapsed.

Looking back, what seems incredible is how I proceeded for several minutes, calmly, returning to the training, informing the class what had happened, cancelling the class, but telling them what to study for our nect meeting, and even reminding them to go vote. Although I had a knot of dread in my stomach, and I knew things were serious because I had called my boss and she told me not to come down to our main office on 61st Street but to go home instead, it wasn't until I walked the hill up 145 Street and I could see down Fredrick Douglass Ave a furious pyre of smoke and dust rising 9 miles south at the bottom of Manhattan that it really hit me.

The buildings were gone. I had little personal connection to the towers, I had never even been up in them. Like many, I used them to orient myself when I got lost in the meandering streets of the West Village. I had seen buildings demolished, like Atlanta's old Fulton County Stadium in controled explosions, but this was chaos, with people falling, shards of glass, and plumes of toxic smoke drifting over Brooklyn.



I spent the rest of the day holed up in my apartment. I talked to my mom, who was freaking out in her own conspiritorial way. I talked to my dad, after almost a year of not talking to him. I heard from a friend,(now my wife) Daliz, who lived in San Francisco and was trying to find her dad who worked downtown near the World Trade Center. I took a break from the somber news reports and walked down to the Hudson River, where thousands of people in suits and ties were walking miles up Riverside Drive trying to get home.

Now when you read or watch the news, or even in academic circles, many talk about the world pre and post 9-11. As if the world suddenly changed, which it did at least in New York City. But I think the jury is still out on this point.

First, the death toll. Over 2,000 people died on September 11, 2001 but does it compare to the 20,000 who died in an earthquake in India in February 2001, or the 17,000 who died in an earthquake in Izmit, Turkey in 1999? 9/11 was a man-made destructive event, terrorism from an external enemy, but does it compare with the backstabbing neglect our government wrought upon its own citizens after Hurricane Katrina? Or the man-made disaster of slums and subhuman living standards that resulted in Haiti losing over 230,000 people?

Second, how does this September 11 compare with that other September 11 (1973) in Chile, when a US-backed coup d'etat deposed Salvador Allende and led to the rise of Augusto Pinochet as dictator? Thousands were disappeared, tortured and killed. That September 11 marked a new era of dirty wars and totalitarian military states throughout Latin America, most often with US complicity and support.

In my job training class that day, there were several Muslims- immigrants from Pakistan and the Middle East (one was named Mohammed) along with folks from Latin America, African-Americans, and whites. All were just as shocked as I was, speechless, worried about their children in schools in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Now we debate whether to put a community center near the World Trade Center site. They were and continue to be New Yorkers just as much as me, and they deserve to be treated a citizens of this city without hatred or malice.