September 11.
No Legal Pad this week. No Sidebar, no Lawyer Tricks. Today is different.
I was in elementary school when 9/11 happened. I remember Dad coming to pick me up early from school, which was a rarity. He was keeping in contact with his business partner over a walkie talkie because the cell phones wouldn’t work. I remember getting home and finding my mom in the kitchen watching the news, which is where we were when the second tower fell. She was crying, which was also a rarity. Most of all, I remember being angry that bad people were killing us for no reason. It wasn’t until years later that I realized every American adult was feeling exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment.
People love to talk about how “volatile” and “dangerous” and “uncivil” the times are. Flip on any news channel and you’ll learn about a new high water mark we’ve crossed as a society and can never return from. My favorite commercial of all time came out in the wake of 9/11 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIzh3jG_D8w). A quiet street of houses. The announcer says, “On September 11, terrorists tried to change America forever.” The image fades and comes back with an American flag hanging from every single house. “Well, they succeeded.” Candidly, I don’t remember when our family started flying a flag. But I can tell you that every place I have lived since that day in fourth grade has had one out on the front porch.
The byproducts of 9/11 are incalculable from a geopolitical standpoint. It changed the world in a way not seen since the “other” American tragedy, Pearl Harbor. But like Pearl Harbor, it brought out the best in us. And when that happens, when this behemoth of a country is spurred into motion, the world shakes.
Still, it is the smaller moments that hit hardest for me 25 years later, now that I’m an adult who can understand their weight. Steve Buscemi, famous actor and proud New Yorker, had been a New York City firefighter in the 1980s before he ever got an acting job. The day after the attacks, he showed up at his old firehouse, Engine 55 in Little Italy, strapped on the gear, and worked twelve-hour shifts on the pile for the better part of a week, digging for survivors alongside men he used to ride with. No cameras. No publicity. He didn’t talk about it for years. It wasn’t a PR stunt; it was what he understood his duty to be.
Welles Crowther, the “Man in the Red Bandana,” was a 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter working on the 104th floor of the South Tower. When the second plane hit, he made his way down to the 78th floor sky lobby, where he found dozens of injured and dazed people, and he started giving orders: anyone who can walk, get up and walk, and anyone who can’t, I’ll carry. He led a group down to safety, then went back up. Then he did it again. He is credited with saving at least a dozen lives, by some accounts closer to eighteen, and he kept going until the tower came down on top of him. In the months after, survivors began telling reporters about a mysterious young man in a red bandana, tied over his face to breathe through the smoke, who had led them out. When his mother, Alison Crowther, read one of those accounts in the New York Times, she knew immediately it was her son. Welles had carried a red handkerchief in his back pocket since he was a boy; his father gave him his first one. It’s on display today in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
Then there is the part of the day almost nobody talks about. When the towers fell, lower Manhattan became an island in the truest sense. The bridges were closed, the tunnels were closed, the subways were shut down, and hundreds of thousands of people were trapped on the tip of the island with a wall of smoke and dust behind them and nothing but water in front of them. So the Coast Guard got on the radio and put out a call for “all available boats.” What showed up was every kind of vessel New York Harbor had: Staten Island ferries, tugboats, fireboats, party boats, dinner cruise ships, private fishing boats, and yachts. Nobody ordered the civilians to come. Nobody trained them for this. Tugboat captains who had spent their careers pushing barges nosed up to a seawall with no dock and started loading strangers covered in ash. Roughly 150 vessels carried nearly 500,000 people off Manhattan in under nine hours. Dunkirk, the most famous maritime evacuation in history, moved about 338,000 soldiers over nine days. New York did more than that in a single afternoon, with no plan, using boats that were built to carry tourists and gravel. My brother has a 21-foot center console. I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that he would have been one of those people, and he wouldn’t have waited for the radio call.
George Bush catches a lot of shit (not as much these days; I think a lot of people now yearn for the good ole Bush days). Three days after the attacks, he was standing on top of a crushed fire truck at Ground Zero with a bullhorn, arm around a retired firefighter, and someone in the crowd yelled that they couldn’t hear him. His answer: “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” The rescue workers started chanting “U-S-A.” That wasn’t in the speech. He just said it.
Seven weeks later he walked out to throw the first pitch at Game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, and it still gives me chills. What makes it better is the backstory. Bush was warming up under the stands, and Derek Jeter walked over and asked if he planned to throw from the mound. Bush said he was thinking about throwing from in front of it. Jeter told the sitting President of the United States that if he did that, the Yankee fans would boo him. Then, as Bush was heading out, Jeter added one more thing: “Don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.” So there’s the President, wearing a bulletproof vest under an FDNY jacket, in a stadium where the Secret Service had every reason to be terrified, sixty feet six inches from home plate, and he throws an absolute heater right down the middle of the plate. Strike. The place came unglued. No speech that fall said as much as that one pitch did.
The point is this: America was built on outlaws and aggression. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a bunch of farmers with a little bit of money and a lot of balls told the greatest military might the world had ever seen to go f**k themselves. In doing so, they not only produced the greatest country on earth, they handed every one of us who followed a birthright. We will not be cowed and we will not back down. Level our buildings and we will level your cities.
But that’s not what separates us from every other society in history. Plenty of empires could level a city. What separates us is what happens next. When the shooting stops, we send in the helpers: the engineers, the doctors, the soldiers handing out water, the church groups and aid workers, and we help the good people who live there rebuild. We did it in Germany and Japan after we had reduced both to rubble, and we did it again in Kabul and Baghdad. Whatever you think of those wars, no other nation in the history of the world has made a habit of rebuilding what it just destroyed.
And what happens at home is even more extraordinary. We give ordinary people the ability to castigate the very leaders who made those decisions, in the newspaper, on the street corner, and at the ballot box. We let citizens sue the government in the middle of a war. Twice, the Supreme Court looked the President in the eye at the height of the fighting and told him no: that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens,” and that even the men held at Guantanamo could walk into a federal courthouse and demand that the government justify holding them. Think about that. The government that had just watched 3,000 of its citizens murdered let a judge tell it how to treat the people it believed were responsible. Nobody was arrested for criticizing the war. Nobody was jailed for burning the flag I keep on my porch. That’s not weakness- that’s the whole point. That’s freedom, and it’s the one thing the men who flew those planes could never understand about us.
When my children (yes, plural, more on that next week) ask me about 9/11, I am going to tell them the truth: there is horrific evil in the world, and there are people who want to kill you who have never met you. But, as Mr. Rogers’ mother told him, when you see scary things in the news, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.
Whether those helpers are wearing a fire helmet or a red bandana, docking a tugboat, or throwing a strike from the mound, there’s a damn good chance they’ve got the stars and stripes flying from the front porch.
Court is in recess- see you next Friday.
