Thursday, 11 September 2003

Wake-up call. It was late in the evening on September 11, 2001, and the day had passed uneventfully: No major news stories, a typical day at work, and nothing that would mark the date as a turning point in history. The sun had long since set over Wellington, New Zealand; we watched a few hours of television before turning in, and then slept the peaceful sleep of the just.

Sixteen time zones behind us, the sun rose over Manhattan. There the day was still young.

In New Zealand it was September 12th, 12:45 a.m., when the first plane hit the tower. It would be another seven hours before I learned we'd been attacked: Driving into work in the morning, turning on the radio, finding the usual morning deejay banter replaced by shocked and somber tones. Hijacked planes. Pentagon attacked. World Trade Center destroyed. Thousands murdered. One of the aircraft (United flight 175, the second plane to hit the Trade Center) was a "code share" with Air New Zealand; thousands of Kiwis were frantically trying to contact hundreds of relatives, but the phone lines from everywhere to New York were jammed. Later we would learn that the body count included two New Zealanders, and ten Australians.

I made it to work and was immediately sent home. Our offices were in a tall building (or what passes for one in Wellington, at least) with an American name on the side, and for the moment that raised a safety issue. New Zealand was almost literally the last place in Western Civilization for a terrorist attack… but on that terrible day all bets were off. Besides, there wasn't much work we could do on the project: The shutdown of air travel from the United States had grounded critical people and equipment. (Some of our people and gear were diverted to Ground Zero, for the desperate and ultimately futile effort to locate survivors by triangulating cell phone signals; others were sent to repair the battered telephone switching machines at 170 West Street, damaged by the collapse of Building Seven.)

I went back to our apartment and spent the rest of the day bearing witness to history… or, as it were, catching up on the dark new pages that terrorists had burned into the book overnight. I was stunned, and angry, and felt strangely guilty that I was not in America: My country had been attacked while I sat safely on the—well, not quite the sidelines, but someplace far away from the danger. I'd seen America wage "war" in Grenada and Kuwait and Somalia and other places, but I knew this wasn't the same thing: This was what it meant to be at war, to be in wartime. It wasn't something I had ever expected to feel.

Somewhere in the boxes I'd unpacked from Australia (and would re-pack and ship back to Oz, the year following) I found the American flag I'd bought at the Sydney Olympics. It was a cheap little flag on a stick, the kind you wave at sporting events, and it would only last only a few weeks before the strong Wellington winds carried it away. My lady-love thought I was being foolish, and the State Department advised a low profile, but I was having none of it: I flew our flag. If that made me a target, then it made me a target.

(It didn't, as it turned out. By the next day half the flagpoles in New Zealand were flying Old Glory at half mast, in a touching and much appreciated gesture.)

It was probably another 18 months, until I took that sabbatical last March, before I recovered from that day. In some ways I still haven't. I've been to Ground Zero and paid my respects: It reminded me in a way of another place I'd been, where I felt like I if I listened hard enough, I'd be able to hear

that was echoing just beyond the natural range of my senses. It seems like mass murder ought to leave some indelible psychic scar, some aura of malice that would make dogs cringe and sensitive people shudder&hellip but the sad truth is that, if murder left even the faintest echo, the world would drown in horror.

After 9/11 I was a zombie for months, my life drained of purpose and meaning—in the post-9/11 world I longed to change the world, to put it back to rights, and nothing I did was important or relevant enough. The sabbatical gave me time to deal with that anger: Not to heal it, perhaps, but to learn to live with it. I'll be angry about 9/11 to the end of my days, and there are still a few things in this brave new world that I want to fix right away—but I can do other things again. My obsession isn't burning me out anymore.

Two years after 9/11, I'm starting to think we're past the worst of it. I know Iraq will trouble us for years to come, the federal government is trending toward insolvency again, the economy is still coughing and sneezing, and Osama remains at large—but I think a year from now we'll be the same or better off, and two years from now we'll be fine. I didn't feel that way on the first anniversary of 9/11; back then the future looked grim and foreboding.

But today I think Iraq just might make it, in spite of our amateurish efforts at nation-building. (Or, if you prefer the glass half full, because of our amateurish efforts. It's not like nation-building is an exact science.) I think the politicians will balance the budget again someday, the SEC will eventually drive out the scam artists and get the economy booming again, and that of Osama and his like-minded brethren are in their final days.

I think the lasting legacy of September 11 will be that it woke all of America to a world without freedom, and led us to realize that the very existence of tyranny is intolerable—that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were rights we could not afford to see denied to anyone. That in order to secure those rights for ourselves, we now have to secure them for Iraq and Afghanistan, North Korea and Liberia, Burma and Iran and Ivory Coast, and everyone else: The world is too small now, the borders too open, to deny justice and freedom to all those who yearn for it.

It's a legacy worth hoping for. And a cause worth fighting for.

And I think we're going to win.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:47 pm. comments.