This morning, five years to the minute after the airplanes hit the towers, I was asleep. Just as I was last year. As I write, I’m looking out on a classic foggy San Francisco morning. The radio’s off, and I’m not sure how to turn on my friend Rich’s television. And I don’t want to.
After five years, there is less to report and more to reflect on.
Some facts. Seven World Trade Center, the one completed building at Ground Zero, is now open. Friends in the real-estate business tell me it will likely be rented by year end, such is the shortage of Class A office space in Manhattan. It sits across from a small park. Despite the characteristically cryptic tone of artist Jenny Holzer’s words streaming along a huge LED panel in the lobby, you might never know this office building was different from any other. Its wider and better-lighted emergency stairways aren’t visible, and stout bollards are now standard issue.
I no longer have the patience to summarize the political and real-estate machinations around the latest of several reconstruction plans for Ground Zero. A litany suffices: Larry Silverstein … security concerns … Daniel Liebeskind … tourists and visitors … The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey … visitors center … Lady Liberty … 99-year lease … New York State Governor George Pataki … emergency evacuation … Ground Zero … “never forget” … floor-area ratio … New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg … the pit … 10 million square feet of office space … damaged Fiterman Hall … truck bombs … New York Police Department … Michael Arad … the relatives … Santiago Calatrava … contaminated DeutscheBank building … reconstruction of West Street … underground tunnels …
And so on.
New York magazine wrote earlier this year about the power wielded by the families of the dead. Their provocative headline–“The Bullies of 9/11”–summarized a sense that the emotional concerns of “the relatives” are given far too much weight in making decisions about the future of Ground Zero. Few officials openly voice this sentiment. It’s not clear how, or if, it will play out. But it’s a common theme among friends.
More acutely, the needs of “the other victims” are bubbling to the surface. The 40,000 workers and early responders who spent significant time at Ground Zero in the weeks after the attacks now suffer well-documented and severe respiratory problems. From firemen to Red Cross volunteers, from office workers to ironworkers, their lungs are compromised, their breathing labored, their lives circumscribed by illness. The official response seems grudging, against the deference and generosity shown to the relatives.
But most people rarely discuss these themes. It’s as though we have an implicit agreement to refer to the events of 9/11 in code, in subtleties of shaded meaning, in a shared language of nods and phrasings. A recent article points out the inevitable: New York is divided among those who were, at various removes, there at the time and those who were not. It cited the phrase, “…and then, 9/11 happened.” It’s one I’ve used myself.
It was a thing, a thing that happened, from the outside, to us here then. It happened. It had an impact. We nod gently to that impact. We move on. We return to the pressing business of the day, which in New York is usually business.
My business now includes writing about advanced automotive technology. It’s an exciting time in car tech. Yesterday, I rode in the Tesla electric roadster (no engine, just an electric motor powered by lithium-ion batteries). It’s a viable vehicle from a Silicon Valley startup that has attracted $50 million in venture capital so far, whose stated goal is to create a new car company. On Thursday, I will drive General Motors’ Sequel hydrogen-fuel-cell concept vehicle, a far more advanced attempt to leapfrog beyond internal combustion.
Together, these cars are small steps in a much larger wave of technologies that will change cars during the rest of my lifetime. Put simply, advances in computing and in energy-storage technologies will make cars far more variable than they are today. At the turn of the last century, three power technologies had roughly equal shares of the nascent market for automobiles: Internal combustion engines, electricity and steam engines. As we know, petroleum-fueled engines won. Now it seems possible that within 20 years, power sources could include gasoline, diesel, other carbon-based fuels, electricity, hydrogen and some combinations of these. Today’s hybrids are a first step, but only a small step.
I hope that 9/11 provides a broader context, a sense of urgency, for evaluating our global use of carbon-based fuels–both for their environmental impact and our consequent reliance on natural resources obtained from countries very different from the ones who use those resources. We are not likely to move away from 150 years of reliance on petroleum by the end of my life, but the discussion itself must be viewed as progress.
And so to reflection. My father suggested that this series of 9/11 letters was a way to make sense of what happened and how I experienced it. That seems right. Perhaps now five years of hindsight let me view my reactions to 9/11–shock, grief, loss, depression–as much greater arcs in my life.
Over Labor Day weekend of 2001, I spent a week at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. One part of that splendid and hard-to-describe event is a “temple of memory,” where visitors perform their own rituals, placing words and relics that commemorate those who have died. At the end of the festival, this multi-story structure and its contents are consumed in flames. It is, to me, a spiritual center and a place of contemplation at an event that’s explicitly devoted to radical self-expression.
Amidst the poems and pictures, drawings and devotions–a jail ID card and a motorcycle jacket pinned to a wall–there is a central altar for those people who died from suicide. There, in my own way, I was finally able to say goodbye to a boyfriend who lost his battle with bipolar disease at age 39, two years earlier.
And nearby I said goodbye to a man I never knew, whose life I could not save, who drowned while we were body surfing. I was 40; he was 26, a life clearly so full of promise and a death that generated such piercing loss among so many people that I still don’t know what responsibilities it leaves to me, the last person he saw in his life.
Saying goodbye to Brian and Michael, that day late in August 2001, felt right and peaceful. Their lives ended suddenly, brutally, and alone. And losses like that are different, sharper, from the suddenness: No matter how painful, how deeply felt, the loss of people from fatal disease generally offers some opportunity to say goodbye while they are still with you.
But saying goodbye is not always a single act, something that’s done and finalized.
I know now that 9/11 tore open pre-existing wounds that were not healed. The candles I lit, the songs I sang, were for my own losses magnified 2,470 times, specific lives brutally ended before their time, added to a much greater pool of loss and of safety gone forever.
Perhaps, as some suggest, I am over-personalizing, embodying the self-centered world view of an narcissistic generation. Perhaps 9/11 is purely an event of war, and should be viewed first and foremost as an attack on all we hold precious, our liberty and our country’s role–undiminished five years later–as a beacon for those who want to make a better life for themselves and their families.
The older I get, the fewer issues can be reduced to black and white, to either/or. And a great blessing of age is a reduced need to persuade others of what I believe, absent a very few topics on which I still find myself passionate. Even those are fewer with time, though no less deeply held.
Five years on, I find myself viewing 9/11 as a specific event whose impact was more mental than physical. Yes, some buildings are gone. And of course our nation has embarked on geopolitical adventures whose strategies, tactics and execution are being vigorously debated–as they must be in a democracy. But the republic has survived. The ebb and flow of commerce continues unabated. And we are far more aware of our place in an ever-more-interconnected global community than we were before.
Those few who wished to terrify us, to shatter our way of life, to propound an extremist world-view and punish a set of people whose beliefs they find repulsive–they’ve largely failed. I have to take off my shoes when I fly, but I haven’t stopped flying.
Pain and loss can be viewed as a gift of a sort. An unwelcome gift, of course, but one whose recipient has the power to make the deliberate choice of how to respond. I hope my choices–to live more richly, to give back in focused ways, to continue with the quotidian details of life–honor the large and small sacrifices made by those it consumed.
best, jv.
P.S. A friend, Chris Barrett of Alberta, Canada, has posted my complete series of 9/11 letters on his blog. I’m honored, and it’s always thought-provoking to see the complete series evolve over time. If you want to revisit, they’re at http://www.gnusworld.com/9-11/jv-911.htm. As always, feel free to circulate this if you know people who might be interested.
Finally, please share with me any thoughts or reactions to this series of letters. New media embodies the evolution from one-way publishing to two-way interaction. I write these letters alone, staring out a window, listening to voices and reliving events inside my own head. If those of you who read them acquire faces, points of view, identities, it will give my words additional value.
John Voelcker