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Cliff Schecter's post | Latest updates on Sulia

9/11 and its great transformations

I don't think I can improve much upon what I wrote on the 10th anniversary of my personal brush with 9/11, so why don't I just quote it here: "On September 11th, 2001, on what was a perfect morning-right up until the very moment a Boeing 767-223-ER slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, I stood on the corner of Delancey and Ridge Streets in downtown Manhattan. I was working on an election campaign - it was primary day in New York - and little did I realise that politics, culture and our entire trajectory as a nation was about to change forever. I had been alerted to the first crash by a friend calling my cell phone, but it was as I was staring at the gaping hole in this New York City landmark, in horror, shock set in as I saw a second plane approaching. I can see it all in slow motion these days - the airplane seemed to glide in almost effortlessly, and as I and others around stood unable to move, a loud explosion echoed through the canyons of lower Manhattan as a fireball erupted that almost seemed to reach where I was standing. It was, for lack of a better term, surreal. I had to process the knowledge that I had been in the North Tower only 16 hours before the attack. Because I had been delivering campaign literature to a volunteer who lived in the neighborhood and thought to myself, "I haven’t been in the Twin Towers for a while". What sticks with me most, though, is that after seeing the second plane hit, a lanky, salt-and-pepper-bearded man standing next to me who was holding his bike at his side, saying, "this is terrible; we’re going to be at war tomorrow". He wasn’t far off the mark. He only underestimated the wars. Along with President Bush, Dick Cheney made it mundane to operate prisons overseas, beyond the reach of due process. House GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor thought nothing of demanding budget cuts to offset the costs of helping those whose lives were destroyed by Hurricane Irene. The response of Texas Governor Rick Perry to a drought in his state is to pray for it to go away. To truly honor the people lost that day, we need to get back to the America of pre-9/11. We need not forget, but we must move on. We need to heal.