Lest We Forget--September 11, 2001

It is now the eighth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The world continues to turn. New York pulls itself up by its bootstraps. The politicians continue to argue over what the final version of the memorial complex should look like, and what it should stand for. The nation struggles with economic and political unrest. Our enemies continue to plot more attacks, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, seemingly without end. In other words, life goes on.

We all have things we will remember throughout our lives. I remember graduating from college, then law school. And the call the day I found out I had passed the State Bar Exam. I remember my wedding day, and the birth of my three children. And the days my mom and dad passed away. But some memories are different. They are so momentous that they sear their way into our memories in a way that keeps them fresh many, many years later. For my parents, it was the attack on Pearl Harbor. For me, it was the day John Kennedy was assassinated, and September 11, 2001.

I am not an early bird, but for some reason, both in 1993 and 2001, I was restless and got up early. I made the coffee, then turned on the television to see what was happening in the world at a little before 6 AM, San Francisco time. And just as in 1993, I saw what was happening, and wondered to myself how I had found a channel with a disaster movie on. One of the World Trade Center towers had been hit by an airplane and there was smoke and wreckage pouring from the building. And at that second, the breath went out of me because I realized I was watching CNN. My thought of course was "how the hell did that happen, and why?" There was still talk about it being a commercial liner that had gotten out of its flight plan for some reason. There was even talk that it was a small aircraft being flown by an inexperienced pilot. I looked at the extent of the damage, and I knew that it was no small plane which had caused that kind of damage.

I listened to the speculation, watched the smoke, fire and what appeared to be snow falling from the building (it turned out it was thousands of reams of paperwork which had been blown out the destroyed windows). By this time I was transfixed, and making up my own scenarios, and trying to imagine how a large commercial airliner could make such a horrible mistake. I thought of the documentaries I had seen about the bomber which crashed into the Empire State Building during World War II, and had decided that his was worse, but the damage I was seeing would probably not get much more extensive. And the last thought on my mind was that this was a terrorist attack. I'm no ignoramus, but I wouldn't have known Osama bin Laden from the Kentucky Colonel at that time.

And then it happened, right in front of our eyes. A second large passenger jet headed straight into the other tower. Instantaneously, speculation stopped. It didn't take a genius to figure out at that moment that this was a planned attack. Who, what or how, nobody knew. But it was clearly not a coincidence and not an accident. I spent the next few hours watching in horror at the unfolding events. I saw the bodies fall from the upper floors as desperate people chose a quick death over a long and painful death from fire. And we watched the smoke slowly cover the southern tip of Manhattan, and eventually much of the city.

I was working on a contract negotiation with a local union at Macy's Union Square in San Francisco, and I decided that for the first time in many years, I was not going to work that day. So I called and got a recorded message that because of the attack (they already used the word) in New York, all Macy's stores would be closed until the extent of the attack and the possibility of further attacks had been determined for all the Macy's urban stores. I settled back in, and continued to watch the coverage as most people nationwide did that day.

In the early afternoon (mid-afternoon in New York) I had a sudden new sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. The last time I had that same feeling was when I found out that my younger daughter had been house-sitting at ground zero when the destructive Northridge earthquake struck Southern California. By September 11, 2001, my son was a successful software engineer for a software company with headquarters in Toronto and a major branch office in New York City. By that time he had moved out of my place and bought his own home in Berkeley, so I wasn't in daily contact with him anymore. The week of the attack, he was to be making his rounds in Canada and New York. I remembered that his itinerary took him from Toronto to New York, and he should be returning from New York that day. Because of the branch location, he preferred flying out of Newark. And by this time, the Pentagon had been hit, and United Airlines Flight 93 had gone down somewhere in Pennsylvania. It took awhile for it to sink in, with all the information and speculation being televised, but it finally registered with me that there was a good chance that Flight 93 would have been the flight he would be on.

I started calling his cell phone. No response. I wasn't in full panic mode yet, but I was very worried. I called my ex-wife, and both my daughters, and nobody had any idea where he was. So I called multiple times, and then out of desperation called his land line at home, figuring that he would either be home soon, or I would be facing an unimaginable loss. He immediately picked up the phone. I'm sure he still remembers the tone and volume of my voice when I yelled "why the hell didn't you answer your goddam cell phone?" I was overcome with relief, but all I could do was yell. Once I calmed down and stopped yelling, he said he was fine, and he had gone downstairs to get his morning coffee when he got distracted by the events on TV. He had left his cell phone upstairs in his bedroom. And then a little sheepishly, he admitted that his private consulting business was doing so well that he had quit his job about two weeks earlier. He had simply forgotten to tell me. While I was trying to avoid picturing him on that downed flight, he was comfortably sitting at home and hadn't been anywhere near New York City.

I'm sure many of you had similar experiences. And I'm sure all of you have that day etched in your minds. We need to remember and honor those 3,000 people who died that day at the hands of a vile enemy who struck without warning and without mercy. They struck without even considering the immorality of murdering thousands of civilians. They simply justified it with their twisted religious beliefs.

But we also need to do something else. We need to do what Abraham Lincoln told us to do. We need to resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, and that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. We must never forget the horror of that day lest it cease to have meaning. But we must also remember it for the purpose of holding to the belief that we are still the leading nation in the free world. What the Civil War could not do because we pulled together in the aftermath, and what Pearl Harbor could not destroy, September 11 cannot destroy either. From the very beginning following the attacks, the police and fire fighters, and ordinary New Yorkers reminded us of our duty to help our fellow man and rebuild what was damaged. We survived September 11, and we'll survive a major recession and a demagogic administration that does nearly everything wrong. We'll survive a Congress that does nothing to solve the nation's problems while spending like a drunken sailor and legislating on all the wrong issues in all the wrong ways.

Honor the dead and remember the day because we have a duty to those who died. And that duty is to bring America fully back to life and liberty. Anger and sadness are elements of that memory, but they must be accompanied by an even stronger resolve never to be defeated. No matter what physical monument they finally put up in New York City, the true memorial must be in our hearts and souls. If we honor the past and put our hearts, minds and will into the future, those dead will not have died in vain. And remember the words of Flight 93 hero Todd Beamer: "let's roll."