I didn't write anything on the anniversary of 9/11. I wasn't sure what to write, and I'm not certain it's doing us any good to keep using it in political discourse. And then, I'm not even sure what, if anything, changed after 9/11. Things got meaner. Politicians (all) seemed to use it to get elected, or to justify the dismantling of our civil rights and constitution, or to argue for torture. All bad things. We, as a people, don't seem to have changed much, though we certainly seem to be more fearful. We've been spoon-fed fear, after all, for 6 years now. 9/11 let the fear-mongerers have at, that's for sure.
But there is one thing that I can absolutely say without uncertainty that has changed for me, perhaps forever. And that is the view of airplanes from the ground. Obviously, I live in a major metropolitan area, with one of the country's busiest airports nestled nearby, and another smaller one a little further south, for good measure. And I work even closer to that big, busy hub of air travel, so low-flying planes aren't rare or odd around here. Sometimes, they feel so low it seems they're crashing. But then, I've lived in this area all my life, so this many planes dotting the sky aren't new to me. My grandmother lives also rather close to the big airport, so even in my childhood, the planes were low to the ground.
But never before 9/11 did I look up at a plane and think, "I wonder"....I'm not saying that I think it'll happen again. But sometimes, the view of a plane set against the skyline takes my breath away for just a minute, as I contemplate what it must have looked like on that morning, set against the skyline of New York. Of course, I wasn't there, and I don't think all the TV shots in the world can possibly tell us what it really looked like for those planes to be flying straight for a building. On Monday night, I had such a thought, watching from my car in stop-and-go traffic from the Ike, as a plane flew across the sky, across the sky before the Sears Tower. Of course, such a plane flying for the Tower would be lower. It'd be bigger. That's what I tell myself when I have these wicked thoughts. But my mind doesn't know how to figure out what a plane flying into a building would actually look like from whatever vantage point I'm at. My mind only knows that it's possible, and that six years ago, it happened. I spent that long 9/11 watching news for 12 hours, watching again and again the footage, and though I've only seen it a couple of times in the years since, my mind can almost certainly call it up with deadly clarity.
Those images, though, are abstract. Plane against sky. Tall building all alone against sky. Plane, sky and building colliding. Fire, explosion, plane swallowed by building. There are no other buildings in that recollection. There isn't a little key to let me know scale. I don't know what that collision looked like from the ground. From a car on the roads into New York City. From an apartment across the water in Jersey. My mind cannot compute those vagaries of scale. I only know that it's possible, and that six years ago, I watched it happen, over and over and over and over and over again: flying machine into building. Flying machine into building. Airplane swallowed by structure. Airplane swallowed by structure. And my mind thinks, surely not again. But not surely, because there's nothing to say it couldn't and won't happen again. There's no assurance I can give myself that is true in those moments, only that if that plane was headed for the Sears Tower, it'd look way bigger right now, right?
This small thing--airplane vs. skyline--this is the thing that's changed since 9/11. This is the thing that every day forces its way into my consciousness. I can only assume I am not alone.
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