I was there that day.
I was lucky. I didn't lose a family member. I didn't work in the towers, I didn't have to run for my life, I wasn't physically harmed. But my office was a mere half-block from the WTC. I heard the screams, saw the bleeding people, felt the heat of the flames, smelled the burning jet fuel, wondered if that person jumping was someone I knew, or maybe this one ... or that one. I calculated how far I'd need to run if one of the towers toppled. The first one fell as I stumbled numbly into downtown Brooklyn. WHOOM. I'll never forget that sound. I thought they were bombing the city, whoever "they" were. I hugged a crying stranger on the street. I wrapped myself in blankets when I got home, spent hours shivering in shock. And I was one of the lucky ones.
In the end, I lost a co-worker and a classmate. One of my work friends lost her best friend and suffered a miscarriage from the stress. A major client lost most of their employees. My surviving co-workers each had their own traumatic story, some of them unspeakably horrific. Blood, glass, death, dust, destruction. The company brought in counselors. I wept every day for 6 months.
So, when I say that the very people who purport to be protecting the sanctity of Ground Zero are often the same folks who have allowed -- and in some cases, caused -- the continuous desecration of the site and the infliction of mental anguish on the survivors of that day, I'm speaking from a place of deep personal experience.
Don't get me wrong; this is just one person's view. Everyone experienced that day differently. I'm the first one to point out that I was lucky, and that others suffered greatly, in unimaginable ways. My experience was by no means special. But my experience is sure as hell deeper than some random guy in, oh, Sacramento or somewhere who saw it all happen on TV and somehow thinks he has the right to tell a group of U.S. citizens where they can or can't build a community center. The fact that anyone listens to that guy at all is ludicrous. It reminds me of a guy I know who was in San Francisco on 9/11, didn't know a soul anywhere near the hijacked planes, saw the whole thing on TV, and somehow was so affected that he now gets counseling for his PTSD. This country spawns some truly crazy folks -- don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
We've all heard the Park51 haters ranting that "Two blocks is too close!" My response (beyond the obvious and best retort of "How far away is far enough?") is this:
If you and everyone you have ever loved were more than 2 miles away that morning, if you weren't caught in the dust cloud, if pieces of burnt paper didn't rain down on your home all day, if you didn't spend frantic days searching for someone you cared about, if you didn't live or work in the 5 boroughs when it all happened, and, most particularly, if you can't tell me the full name of at least one person who died that day, you don't get to vote about what can or cannot be built in that neighborhood.
I'm just sayin'.
This whole shitstorm that's happening now is ridiculous in many ways. It's racist and fear-based and discriminatory and ignorant of history and ...
But I'm not going to go into that. I want to talk about something else. Desecration. Disrespect. Crapping on sacred ground. Active disdain for people who have been through intense trauma. No, this is not another diary dissecting the anti-Muslim propaganda that's feeding the current news cycle. The insulting behavior that touched me on a personal level started long before anyone contemplated turning a deserted Burlington Coat Factory store into a community center. In fact, the activities I'm referring to happened almost immediately, before the dust had cleared. And I still get so angry that I shake every time I think about it.
It all started with the vendors. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, you could stand in Times Square and buy handmade photo albums of the planes crashing into the towers, people jumping from buildings, photos of an event that ended thousands of lives. Buying those books was the still-photo equivalent of watching snuff films. Within weeks, you could buy Ground Zero hats, t-shirts and miscellaneous tchochkes. People have profited from the events of that day, in droves, and they continue to do so, all day, every day. Not just politicians and defense contractors, but people, citizens, everyday people making a quick buck from an enormous tragedy. So, tell me, how is that not the ultimate "desecration"? How has it ever been acceptable to have vendors hawking voyeuristic crap at the very site of the attacks? And, for that matter, who are the vultures who actually buy this stuff? Is it you?
Where is the concern for the so-called "sacred" ground? Where is the concern for the victims' families? How can we justify allowing vendors to profit from the loss of someone's son, brother, daughter, mother -- on the very site where their lives were lost? Must the inexorable forces of the free market always trump compassion and good taste? How is it that this country has its knickers in a twist over a building that you can't even see from Ground Zero, yet we're perfectly comfortable allowing random entrepreneurs to sell DVDs full of 9/11 porn on the sidewalk in front of the former WTC? I haven't been back in several years, but when I was there in 2008, people who lost family members still wouldn't have been able to reach the site without walking past tables full of crap exploiting their relatives' deaths. Where were the furious mobs protesting that ongoing and blatant disrespect?
But back to my story. It wasn't just the vendors that got to me in those dark days. The thing that really pushed me over the edge was the viewing platform. You know they built a viewing platform, right? Like they have at the Grand Canyon or other places where tourists gather to "ooo!" and "aaaahh!" No, I'm not talking about the space behind the thick wire fence that keeps you from falling into the construction area, that spacious sidewalk space that helpfully provides you with relatively tasteful explanatory exhibits. In the months after the attack, that sidewalk didn't exist. The space around the towers was covered in piles of rubble, burnt vehicles, human remains and rescue workers. The whole area was a crime scene. But the tourists wouldn't stay behind the yellow tape. So the city, in its infinite wisdom, threw up a plywood and scaffolding viewing platform at Church and Fulton Streets on December 30, 2001, mere months after the attacks, with a ramp that ran between the memorial fence at St. Paul's Church and the office building where I worked. The goal was to give the tourists a destination, let them have their visit, while keeping them corralled where they could presumably do little harm to themselves or others.
The viewing platform was a huge attraction. For those of us who worked next door, that wooden cattle chute quickly became what is known in legal parlance as an "attractive nuisance." The crowds were enormous and, for all their pious posturing, they were incredibly insensitive to the way their presence was impacting our lives. None of them seemed to realize that this wasn't like going to Disney World, that there were people living and working in lower Manhattan, people whose lives had been thrown into chaos, and that their presence was not helping any of us heal. Oblivious and obstinate, each member of the mooing herd wanted to be first in line to "pay their respects," when, in practical terms, that meant blocking traffic while gawking at the steaming pile of rubble.
That's one thing that most people don't realize -- the fires burned for months. Those of us who worked in buildings next to the pile (not to mention those who were working on the pile itself) were constantly breathing in the noxious smell of burning god-knows-what, with that awful after-taste that you knew was a combination of chemical poisons and death. If you lost someone you cared for, you had to consciously keep yourself from thinking that you were inhaling them every time you took a breath.
In the first week after the towers fell, we sat at home while our employer counted heads, let us know who was missing, reached out to clients, rebuilt our computer system on borrowed servers, figured out how to keep the business going. For about 7 weeks, we worked from borrowed space in buildings around town. My temporary office was not exactly a comforting place to be in the days after airplanes had been flown into office towers. We were about 30 stories up, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Times Square, a place everyone considered to be the next likely target. The building held frequent evacuation drills, with bleating sirens that scraped on our nerves. Some of my co-workers ended up working in the media towers where anthrax showed up. The stress of those uncertain days never eased.
The powers that be brought us back downtown as soon as they could, saying that the air was safe, the office clean. In hindsight, I try to cut them some slack, recognizing that the bosses were just as traumatized as the rank and file employees. But no one had cleared the gritty dust from the files on our desks, no one had swept the chunks of disintegrated buildings (and, in one case, a piece of someone's shoe) off the ledges outside our windows, and they certainly hadn't sealed up the gaps in those old drafty windows. My nose bled for the first several days; it felt like we were breathing shredded glass. The office manager offered duct tape. A bunch of us went to J&R and bought personal air filters for our offices. The filters were black after the first week.
I'll never forget the date we returned to the bruised wreck that was Lower Manhattan, because it was the day that AA Flight 587 crashed on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Men cried in the hallways when they heard the news. We were all alive but incredibly fragile, and nothing in the environment let us forget what had happened. Going to work each day was like re-living the trauma over and over. Some people quit, left the city, went to other jobs. Others dived into their work, burying themselves in their offices, plowing through as much paperwork as they could to keep their minds off of what had happened, and what was still happening outside.
In January 2002, when they finally started issuing free tickets to the viewing platform -- tickets, as if it were a Broadway show, for chrissakes -- they were able to count how many people were squeezing past our building and up that ramp. 250 per hour. 5,000 per day. Every day.
In all fairness, most of the tourists truly thought they were paying their respects to the dead.
''This is nothing -- our little cold feet -- compared to what some people are going through. I've felt so helpless. Coming here, I can pay my respects and give them my support. The cold is nothing.''
But in their self-centered wish to be part of the national tragedy, these otherwise well-meaning folks completely overlooked the fact that they were disrespecting the living. Their voyeurism was literally interfering with my ability to leave my office during the day. If I wanted to go get a sandwich, I had to physically shove my way through crowds of people to get away from my building. Getting back inside was even more difficult, because they thought I was cutting in line and got all belligerent with me. It was yet another hurdle in my daily struggle to survive that time. Some days, it was more than I could take.
Simply getting out of bed was tough. PTSD works in weird ways. For me, it showed up in morning crying jags, dramatic weight loss, an obsession with running (because, y'know, I might need to), and a near complete inability to sleep. The kind Korean woman at my dry cleaner would shove handfuls of candy at me when I dropped off my suits. "Eat! You must eat!" she cried. I'd pocket the candy and hurry off to the subway, which might or might not be running, depending on where the latest bogus terror threat was. It's a particularly painful kind of torture to be stuck under the East River for 45 minutes at a time in a train packed full of New Yorkers with PTSD, each glancing warily at the other in the hopes that they're not carrying a bomb. The claustrophobia alone was enough to push someone over the edge -- add the possibility of an anthrax attack, and the tension becomes literally unbearable. I lost count of how many people I saw crying on my commute. Sometimes I was one of them.
And then finally, finally, the train would pull into the station, and I would claw my way up the stairs into ... another crowd, but not the "hurry up we're all trying to get somewhere" crowd of professional commuters -- this was a crowd of tourists, those slow-moving cattle whose single-minded purpose was to Stand In Line to Pay Their Respects, and Who The Hell Cares if you have to get to work. What they're doing is The Most Important Thing! You -- well, you're lucky, you're alive, you didn't die that sunny September day, they're not here to pay their respects to you. They may say they're here to support you, but the simple fact is that they don't give a damn about you; they don't even see you. You're simply in their way. Some days, I yelled at them. Some days I just shoved my way through them, throwing elbows and stepping on toes. Some days, I turned around and went home, crawled back into bed.
So now, 9 years later, I've moved on, left the city, become a parent, changed my life in countless ways. But as September rolls around each year and I smell the clear crisp beginnings of autumn, I start to tense up, lose sleep, fray a bit around the edges. I brace myself for the onslaught of articles and photographs, the continuous conflation of heartfelt memorials, naked voyeurism, heartless manipulation, and political posturing that 9/11 has become.
And this year, when thousands of often well-meaning folks are ranting on and on about the Need to Remember, the Need to Honor Sacred Space, the Need to Show Compassion by imposing a strict code of (their own personal) moral values on the blocks surrounding the perpetual construction site, I have an overwhelming desire to scream at them: "If you're so f-ing full of concern for what happened there, where the HELL was your righteous indignation and outrage when we needed it?!?!"
To which, I imagine a great number of them would respond, "Why, honey, I was there. I was right there with you. I was praying for you all. I can prove it. See my Ground Zero hat? And here's a photo of me standing on the viewing platform ..."