22 Years Later

The day that will always haunt us

It is now a generation ago. My oldest daughter who I was holding when I picked up the phone that morning to hear the news is off on her own as a tech professional working in London. To her and her younger sister there simply wasn’t a pre-9/11 world. For them it is hard to explain a thriving and sunny New York that under the guidance of the incredible Rudy Giuliani had become the envy of the world as the place where the dividends of the booming 1990s were being reaped. The internet and globalization where still relatively new and our new best friends were Russia and China. Smartphones did not exist. The biggest events in the summer of 2001 were some shark attacks and getting to know the new guy in the White House who spent his vacation chopping wood on his ranch in Texas. In a way we were still in Clinton land. If we could, we would have frozen the mood and the innocence that we all experienced when we went to sleep on September 10, 2001.

Looking back now that day signalled a total new era. The post-attack interest rate cut was the first sign of the cheap money era. The ‘warbloggers’ heralded the era of fierce online political debate. The establishment of Homeland Security and the TSA brought us the security state. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gave us the limits of our ability to change countries and history in a positive way. The war spending accelerated the deficits. And while the threat of Islamic terror has now somewhat receded, it bruised us as we eventually welcomed Russia and China as our new enemies. We can point to that day when it became clear that Western power was not going to be unchallenged forever. An in an indirect way it also gave us that New Yorker who created a vision of a far more isolationist America. And that is where we are today. History never starts or ends on a specific day, but there are moments where we realize what changes are taking us where. That was the core trauma of 9/11.

But there was more to that day than the winds of history sweeping us out of our state of complacency. Some three thousand perished that day. The human toll was unbearable. We either directly or indirectly knew victims or we had done business with the companies they worked for. We needed to go to the level of the individual to understand the pain as the abstraction of numbers never really works in translating grief. The stories of Italian and Irish working class families who made up the backbone of the NYPD and FDNY, the grief at trading house Cantor Fitzgerald which disappeared overnight, to the many funerals where with snipers on the roof and the wailing sounds of bagpipes the dead were laid to rest. It became a story of us all and for us all. It is not a cliché, we literally all became New Yorkers back then.

Again, it is so hard to imagine now, but CNN was the go to source and it was on 24/7, almost. Wall Street was closed for a number of days and in an instant the unknown quantity that was President George W. Bush became famous with his bullhorn speech. Everyone had an opinion. All of sudden obscure academics who had studied Islam became household names. The right stood up and said: “we told you this was coming” and the left was divided between those who wanted revenge and those that descended into what we called ‘moral relativism’. The sort of relativism that said, ‘we had it coming’. Bill and Hillary wanted war. Western nations were divided. Canada provided support, but stopped short of going into Iraq a few years later. Europe with its many Muslim immigrants was confused. It ripped us apart and brought us together, all at the same time.

John Vigiano Sr. died in 2018 and at that point had outlived his two sons John and Joe by seventeen years. Of the three Storycorps videos about the lives of those that were affected by this day, his is the one that goes really deep. It will make you cry and yes, it even has a Trump reference. But in the end all three videos stir up loss, grief and our inability to preserve what we love most. I have tweeted these out over the years or shared them on Facebook. They bring me closest to what we were feeling on that day. And they point to the human tragedy where total innocents become the victims of machinations beyond their reach, machinations that no one sees coming or no one really understands. Or both.