Ten Years Later - Remembering 9/11

Ten years ago today, I was at my office at the Ottawa Business Journal. For some reason I'd started work early that day, because I was at my desk when a commotion started in another part of the office. I got up to see what was going on.

Because I worked for a newspaper, there were a few televisions around the office. I noticed a group of people clustered around one of the TVs in the editorial department. There were two or three similar groups around other TVs elsewhere in the large room. I went over to the nearest one to see a scene on the screen of smoke billowing out of a tall building...one of the world trade centre buildings, someone said. They said a small plane had crashed into the building.

I remember thinking at the time that was odd, because not too long before that, a small plane and a helicopter had crashed into buildings in other cities in separate incidents. What's going on with these pilots, I wondered?

This was the first view we had
of the second plane, just before it hit.

But then, as we watched, a second plane crashed into the other world trade centre tower -- and it wasn't a small airplane, it was a huge passenger jet and it was surreal. I stood there with my hand over my mouth. I  felt how wide my eyes were. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen. The view we had at that point showed the plane going into the far corner of the building, and then fire and smoke immediately spewing out the other side.

"That was not a coincidence," I said out loud. "That was deliberate. This is terrorism." No one else said a word, but there were gasps and moans from all of us.

We all stood watching, horrified and worried. Soon after, the news outlets began reporting on the attack on the Pentagon and then the plane that crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

I was scared.

It seemed like the world was tilting on its axis. Where would the next attack happen? When would it stop? Who was doing this?

We all stood and watched for a long time, but it was still a work day and, feeling disjointed and confused, I finally forced myself to go back to my desk and try to work. I made frequent trips back to the TV for updates. After a few hours, when no further attacks occurred, we all relaxed a little and started feeling safer. Because, even here in sleepy Ottawa, Canada, we feared we might be victims. We're not all that far away from New York, Washington and Shanksville. We are the capital city of a modern, affluent, democratic country that is best friends with the United States. We could very conceivably be the target of the kinds of people who'd highjacked those airplanes. We still could be.

Of course, as soon as I got home that day, I turned on the television and sat there all through the evening watching the horrific scenes and reporting from the three sites. I still couldn't really get my head around it. This was really happening. The things I was seeing just wouldn't square up with my understanding of reality, or even of what was possible in reality. I felt confused, frightened, unsafe. After the first shock of watching the live incident, it almost seemed to get worse and worse as the reports came in, and the steady stream of new film and photos that had taken a while to reach the news agencies.

The film and photos that horrified me the most, which made me burst into tears of shock and compassion, were those of bodies falling from the towers. People who were so terrified of burning to death in their offices, that they had leapt out of shattered windows and fallen to their deaths below. I couldn't imagine the terror that must have preceded such an act.

I was also intensely disturbed by the shot of a massive cloud of ash and smoke spewing around the corner of a building toward a group of terrified, running people. It looked like a giant monster seeking them out with evil intent, a live, solid, evil thing chasing them.

Of course, all the things I saw on television that day where shocking, disturbing, intensely unsettling. For days and days I couldn't watch anything else. Couldn't refocus on my normal life. I know that pretty much everyone else in North America and many other places felt the same way. The world was changed on that day. An act of unspeakable malignance and evil was thrust upon us. Not just on the over 3,000 people who lost their lives directly because of the attacks, but every single human being on this planet that was alive at that time, and who were and will be born since.

But it will always be especially personal for those of us who lived through it, whether in person or through the breathless reporting of every news agency out there, because of the ways it has changed the way we think, feel and automatically react to certain situations. I don't think I'll ever get over the automatic worry I now feel every time I see a low-flying plane over the city. I'll never again feel completely safe from people who hate the world I live in. I'll never be the same again.

I think the most profound and disturbing change that those events spawned in me, and I'm sure many, many others, is the regrettable suspicion and, if I'm to be completely honest, bigotry, that I now have toward people of the Muslim faith.

It shames me to admit it. I have always considered myself a very open-minded, tolerant, unprejudiced individual. But not as much any more. Not since my eyes were opened that day to the fact that so many people of that faith hate us, want us dead -- especially if we're Jewish -- want our way of life eradicated and replaced with their stone-age anti-culture in which women are barely-human baby factories and slaves, and men sit on dirt floors and excitedly plot the demise of anyone who isn't like they are. Not since I have seen how little was done to repudiate and vilify those events by others of that faith who claim not to hate us, yet never demonstrated that they hate the villains of 9/11. Not since the violence and the attackes have continued around the world. Not since the rejoicing in middle eastern cities at the news of the events of 9/11. Not since people of that faith tried to spit in our faces by trying to build a mosque within blocks of Ground Zero.

As an atheist, I reject all forms of religion. But now I particularly reject Islam and its followers, for it spawns hate and fear and backwardness, and puffs out its chest in defiance of civility, peace and love.

And I deeply resent their so-called "culture" (for Islam is not a culture, it's just a template for hate) for making me more like they are.