9/11, Ten Years Later

Chris Zimmerman

In a week it will all be over: the wall-to-wall TV coverage and special commemorative issues, the memorial concerts and 5K runs, the laying of wreaths, the playing of taps, and the endless conversations about how the world has “changed since 9/11”, if indeed it really did.

Of course it has. True, the juggernaut of terror that ripped a hole in America’s heart has settled into something quieter, if not completely invisible, over the course of a decade. But the visceral fear awakened that day is still there as a low-level anxiety, gnawing in the pits of a million stomachs. How else to explain that just this week, an acquaintance looked up into the crystalline blue of a perfect September morning and remarked, with no apparent irony, “Doesn’t this remind you of 9/11?” How else to explain the panic over an unattended bag at the airport where I left my son three days ago as he headed back to school – the police and the crime tape, the bomb-sniffing dogs and robotic sensor? What is it when a whole subway line can be brought to a halt over an abandoned plastic container of strange pink liquid that turns out to be nothing more than grapefruit juice (this happened in New York City two summers ago)?

Of course the world has changed. Bin Laden is dead. Qaddafi’s been toppled. Afghanistan, as promised, was bombed back to the Stone Age. To some, these are real victories. To others, they have a hollow ring against the background murmur of endless overseas wars. True, there may have been no seismic shifts in popular culture or any other aspects of public life. The old bravado is back (if it ever went away), and the only dust swirling around Ground Zero these days is being kicked up by new cranes and new construction crews. After years of real-estate wrangling and political controversy, the so-called Freedom Tower is finally rising above the Hudson, and the footprints left by the old Twin Towers are now reflecting pools, surrounded by trees. In a few years – who knows? – a new generation of office workers will be taking their breaks in their shade.  And yet: life will never again be the same. Even if the last shards of glass, the last mounds of ashes are long gone, the toxic cloud that plumed and settled over Manhattan ten years ago this week is still silently working in the lungs of countless people who breathed it.

Of course the world has changed. The real question is if it has changed for the better: whether the shock of an unprecedented disaster was enough to sustain the waves of generosity, solidarity, and community that it set off, or whether they ebbed away as people pulled back from the brink, swore off their vulnerability as a weakness, and moved on.

Describing the horror of 9/11 in light of something he was wholly unprepared for – the sense that not only evil powers, but also divine ones, had been simultaneously unleashed – Artie van Why, a New York playwright, recalls:

I don't believe I had witnessed the wrath of anyone's God that morning. What I had been a witness to when I looked up at those burning towers was the ultimate evil that man is capable of. The evidence of just how deep hatred could run, how far it could go. But I had also been a witness to something else that day…. I witnessed the ultimate goodness of man, the evidence of how strong courage could be, to what lengths it would go. I believe God was in the hands of everyone who reached out to someone else. He was in the arms of people on the streets as they embraced one another. He was in the tears of strangers who cried together. He was in all the lives that were given in the line of duty, in the acts of heroism. He was in the hearts of the people across the country who, as they watched the horror from afar, felt compassion. 

Again and again, amid the haunting stories of sickening fear, mind-numbing grief, and utter desperation, similar accounts have surfaced and leavened our collective memory of 9/11. Inexplicable flickers of goodness, they keep reappearing and lighting up the dark.  Set against the history-altering events of the last decade, they may seem as tiny and powerless as fireflies at night. But that is no reason to discount or dismiss them. After all, each one represents a changed life: a person who was transformed by 9/11, and who in turn is now transforming others. To illustrate, here are the stories of two New Yorkers I know:

The first is that of Lyndon Harris, the priest in charge of St. Paul’s, an historic church at the foot of the Twin Towers. On 9/11, Fr. Harris spent the morning evacuating children from nearby nurseries. By evening, he had opened the chapel to hundreds of “first responders.” For most of the next year, it was open 24 hours a day, and quickly become the refuge of choice for firefighters, police officers, heavy-equipment operators, and others. The news media’s attention was unrelenting, as was the praise. Fr. Harris and his colleagues were hailed as heroes.

Once emergency operations ceased, St. Paul's closed for inspection, and Fr. Harris faced a new set of realities. Internal divisions concerning the direction of ministries at his church were growing, and when they boiled over, Fr. Harris resigned. The next three years brought him Job-like tests: his lungs showed damage from constant exposure to toxic dust. He went through a divorce. He lost his home to foreclosure. Worse, “PTSD and depression began taking over my life. I was bitter and deeply resentful.”

The turning point came when a friend, instead of commiserating, told Fr. Harris he had to forgive. The priest hung up the phone – but later realized his friend was right. Fast forward several years, and Fr. Harris is a new man. Having traveled to Beirut, another city scarred by terrorism, he was inspired by seeing a “garden of forgiveness” there. Today he is co-founder of “Gardens of Forgiveness,” a non-profit project planting peace from Soweto, Rwanda, and Liberia, to Chicago and New York, and is helping to develop a forgiveness curriculum for middle-school students.

The second is that of Jane Viau, a former vice president at Merrill Lynch. With 16 years in finance, she enjoyed her plum job and salary, and found her work as a banker “interesting and intellectually challenging.”  Then came 9/11, and an early midlife crisis. “I thought, if I’d perished that day, what would be my legacy? What have I done that’s of any use?” After months of soul-searching, Viau decided that teaching math to underprivileged kids would be the perfect way to use her skills to make a difference. She says that people looked at her like she was insane, but “the timing was perfect.”  She’s been teaching at Frederick Douglass, a high school in Harlem, ever since, and says that even on the most challenging days, she has never regretted her decision.

For me, both stories give reason to believe that 9/11 was not only a day of infamy, but one when God stopped people in their tracks, and set them on new paths. In a world where every morning seems to herald new disasters – hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes; riots, mass murders, rising joblessness and slumping stocks – they are anecdotal evidence that in the midst of the most insidious evil, there may be some hidden good; that no matter how overcast the horizon at dawn, there may still come a beautiful sunrise.

On September 11, 2001, another New Yorker – Detective Steven McDonald – watched the day’s events unfold, but couldn’t respond as he’d been trained. Years earlier, in Central Park, he had fallen victim to another bolt from the blue: he’d been shot, point-blank, multiple times by a teen he stopped for robbery. Personally, it was his 9/11— the day his life changed for good. Left paralyzed from the neck down, he has spent the last 25 years on a breathing tube, and in a wheelchair. But he has not let tragedy defeat him.

Just six months after the shooting, his first child was born, and fatherhood “gave me a new focus and strengthened my will to live.”

I prayed that I would be changed, that the person I was would be replaced by something new. That prayer was answered with a desire to forgive the young man who shot me. I wanted to free myself of all the negative, destructive emotions that his act of violence had unleashed in me: anger, bitterness, hatred, and other feelings. I needed to free myself of those emotions so that I could love my wife and our child and those around us.

Clearly, there’s nothing easy about being paralyzed. Det. McDonald has not been able to hold his wife in his arms for more than two decades. His child is now a man. “I’ve never been able to have a catch with him. It’s frustrating – difficult – ugly – at times.” So why did he forgive? In his own words:

I forgave, because I believe the only thing worse than receiving a bullet in my spine would have been to nurture revenge in my heart. Such an attitude would have extended my injury to my soul, hurting my wife, son, and others even more. It’s bad enough that the physical effects are permanent, but at least I can choose to prevent spiritual injury. Again, I have my ups and downs. Some days, when I am not feeling very well, I can get angry. I get depressed. There have been times when I even felt like killing myself. But I have come to realize that anger is a wasted emotion…

Today, Det. McDonald is a sought-after speaker at schools throughout New York, holding entire auditoriums captive as he retells his story and launches dialogue on the broader issues surrounding it. To him, the cycle of violence that plagues so many lives today – whether unleashed in an event like 9/11, or in a private incident, like the one that almost took his life--can be overcome only by breaking down the walls that separate people and make them afraid of each other. The best tools for this, he says, are love, respect, and forgiveness.

Quoting Robert F. Kennedy, he likes to point out that “the victims of violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown, but they are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings have loved and needed.” And somewhere in each address, he finds a way to refer to Martin Luther King – a man who gives him unending inspiration: “When I was a very young kid, Dr. King came to my town. My mother went to hear him speak, and she was very impressed by what she heard. He said that there’s some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us, and that when we learn this, we’ll be more loving and forgiving.”

In the end, how 9/11 (or any other such event) changes the world is out of our hands. Still, each of us can decide how we allow it to change our own lives. We can choose to wallow in cynicism, in anger or despair. But we can also turn our backs on these things. In an interview at Det. McDonald’s Long Island home a few years ago, he told me of his assurance that there are more stories of love and hope in the world, then of violence and revenge. As I turned off the recorder, he indicated he wasn’t done. “Add this,” he said. “Yours could become one of them.”

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Sources: New York Post, January 31, 2011 (Jane Viau). Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 2009 (Lyndon Harris). “That Day in September” (Artie van Why). Why Forgive?, by J Christoph Arnold (Steven McDonald).