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25th Anniversary of 9-11

American flag photo taken by author

I flew into New York City 25 years and about 12 hours ago. I was excited and nervous: I was scheduled to do stand up comedy for my first time that week at Carolines on Broadway . My stomach was unsettled. I sort of noted the towers from my cab into the city, but really more looked at the skyline with them in it.

Probably only 20 or 30 people on earth knew then that the towers only had hours left to stand. 19 of them would pilot planes into buildings, or be overwhelmed by the ad hoc first warriors of what would become named the War on Terror and make a crater in a field.

This country plunged into 2 decades of wars, and our further reaction to the trauma inked the Patriot Act (and more) that even now, as predicted by those opposed to those measures then, enables the erosion of safety, rights and dignity that tears at us daily.

After finding the hospital nearest my midtown hotel not yet ready for blood donations at scale, for the survivors that heartrendingly never emerged from the wreckage at Ground Zero, I made my way south on Broadway toward my friend Rachel’s apartment.

I had met her 3 years earlier in the audience of a brilliant performance of Twelfth Night at the Lincoln Center. Helen Hunt played Viola. Years later in LA I’d see Hayley Brown play it, and write a warm review of it.

Rachel lived within the boundaries of the part of the city the mayor would declare closed that night, and we looked at each other in shock that we were in a part of a city that was “closed” when it was announced.

Years later, as I stood on the set during production of one of the final episodes of Mad Men, shooting at a beautiful hotel in Los Angeles, I talked on the phone to a friend of Rachel’s who had published a book and was looking to get it made into a movie. I had somehow become her man in Hollywood. I felt bad I wasn’t able to help her friend get the movie set up somewhere, in the end.

That mayor would go on years later to serve the current potus, schedule a press conference in a gardening company’s parking lot instead of a hotel, would drip hair dye randomly and further humiliate himself lasciviously in a Borat movie.

But on that day, 25 years ago, in the evening, not long after he declared he was closing part of the city, he said all school kids in NYC schools would be taken care of, including any who had no one able to come to the school to get them…the unspoken part of that was this: the kids whose parents may have perished that morning who were now orphaned. I think all the kids got home or elsewhere safely that night. That night he was reassuring.

Later our trust in him would help him set the stage and propel the autocratic backslide we now face.

On my way to Rachel’s apartment, I stopped at a grocery store to get some ice cream. Rachel said she was having people over and they needed a dessert. Felt a little surreal.

As I walked south on Broadway, most people were walking north, away from the rising smoke, we all heard a plane.

The qualified relief as we, in unison, looked up and saw it was a warplane, weapons hot, patrolling the sky above Manhattan is hard to describe. One thing was clear about that feeling: it could not have been felt even a day earlier.

We did know, as we looked up and found relief, the plane was not a weapon but a guardian for us. We could not have known then the U.S. military would spend decades waging international violence at our collective behest.

The U.S. marines, so often the first in and last out of wars we fight, were rumored to say in the days and weeks after that their job was not to judge UBL, that was God’s job; their job was to arrange the meeting.

None of us knew that day how many years it would be before UBL would die where he had hid: in Pakistan, our ally in our War on Terror that clearly was not monolithically on our side.

None of us knew that the U.S. marines, with their bravado and skill, would be bearing the brunt of kicking down doors in Afghanistan because they’re configured to move in those smaller than brigade units that the U.S. Army is not really set up to function with.

Marines historically boarded ships during naval battles, and the metaphoric ocean of Afghan towns, villages, cities and settlements, the Graveyard of Empires, would drink the blood of so many as we fought to…I guess pacify that country so no one there would come over here and make American land drink more blood.

The current potus made a deal with the now current rulers of Afghanistan to have them restored to power in that country, the same people who sheltered and helped those who crashed those planes, leveled those buildings, cratered that field, and got us to betray ourselves with things like the Patriot Act twenty five years ago.

None of us knew those brave and honorable marines would later shred a quarter millennia’s mission and honor when they demeaned themselves, the Constitution and the country when they deployed against Los Angeles and took the order to invade a public park, frightening children at camp as they did.

None of us knew the U.S. Congress wouldn’t even blink at such a mighty and once revered fighting force, as the marines, being deployed against the people they exist to protect.

The colonial boomerang is a heck of a thing, and combined with Congressional complacency and an autocratic wannabe dictator, they now bear wounds that are beyond medical, and along with the National Guard that occupies our cities and has killed citizens there, owe a debt to the American People and the U.S. Constitution it may take generations to clear.

My friend Rachel would end up attending the current potus’ first inauguration, and did so joyfully. She passed away before his second election.

And I’m torn: like the sea change of characters in Twelfth Night, things changed, we changed, 25 years ago.

A quarter century later we look back and it is tempting to say we were so innocent then, but we weren’t. Attacks on our embassies in Africa and more made the attacks on that day 25 years ago not entirely unique, though the scale and geography are different enough.

Different enough for us to shift, within ourselves.

Ideals are easy to hold when the weather is nice, the buildings stand and the planes land softly. I am humiliated to find that the inclination to chuck what ideas I hold dear is tempting when stress or loss becomes too sharp, too deep. Too much we have collectively indulged that temptation.

Suspend due process, shred our right to speak out, challenge citizenship itself, offer bribes to the electorate, just please please don’t shatter the peace of a Tuesday in September with roaring of jet engines, the crash of buildings, the panic of cell phone calls from those who will never land. Tear apart the families next door, round up the people insulting our government, track every phone, use our cities as military training grounds, shun our allies and isolate us from the world, just don’t make see people jumping from a building that has them trapped, don’t let me imagine the mass grave created in moments in a farmer’s field, and don’t let me remember the smell, the awful smell of burnt plastics, concrete, rebar and humans when the wind shifted north just under 25 years ago.

That is the comprise made: strip us bare of what we believe ourselves to be and in exchange hurt us anyway.

maga, like the movements like it before it, trades everything for a promise that’s been made and will never be kept, that cannot be kept. It promises that nothing bad will happen to us just as long as we look the other way when bad things happen.

Some people have made the trade, but I get to end this with hope. Why?

Because as people walked north 25 years ago on that morning on that island of Manhattan, searching for a place that might not be targeted, a place at might be safe, we heard a plane, we looked up, and we saw a machine, different than ones used in such rage on the towers, the pentagon, and a field, and we felt relief not because we could see the military branch markings or insignia, no, we felt relief because a stranger to us got into a cockpit, fired an afterburner to get to us in haste, flew above willing to risk themselves and say (not in words but in the roar of engines and the silhouette of a supersonic fighter) a single compelling thing we can all allow ourselves to say to ourselves, to our loved ones, to our neighbors, to our communities and friends and enemies and everyone we are in this with together; we can say, and mean, and stand behind, as that pilot did a quarter century ago: do not be afraid.

My thoughts from a previous anniversary are here: https://stuff.davidaugust.com/some-memories-of-september-11-2001/

David August is a multi-hyphenate in the entertainment industry and has worked as an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent's Day, and after its theatrical run, it's now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town and many others. His product and visual effects artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers and theatre practitioners to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC's Marshall School of Business about internet marketing and sales funnel engineering.