This being the fifth anniversary of September 11, I thought I would add my words to the many already written or voiced. Of course I do remember vividly what I was doing when I heard about the attacks on that day.

I was living in the Princeton, New Jersey, area on September 11, 2001, and was at work. I had just come back from a meeting when people started to talk about planes hitting the two World Trade Center towers - the Twin Towers, the landmarks that first marked Manhattan on the horizon when taking the northeast corridor train in from New Jersey.

I had an old radio in my cubicle that I almost never used, but I turned it on. Peter Jennings, the late ABC news anchor, was speaking. I think one tower had already fallen at that point. Two colleagues came and sat down and listened with me. I remember one of them being both perturbed about the usual rhythms of the day being upset and also worried about the city that she loved dearly. Then we heard Jennings say that the second tower had just fallen. I saw my colleagues’ faces grow ashen, and I felt a wave of anguish.

People were walking around and talking to each other even more at that point, largely abandoning attempts to work. One friend, a committed leftist and foe of George W. Bush and company, rightly suspected terrorism and said that there must be a military response to this attack. “This is no time for pacifism,” I remember him saying.

Anxiety in the office was growing higher. Most people had friends or relatives who lived or worked in New York, and they were trying to call them. Some even lived in the city and commuted to Princeton. Reaching anyone in Manhattan that day was next to impossible.

I called a friend and asked about another friend, Paul Tava, who worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the 71st floor of Tower One. She didn’t know where he was but later contacted me to say he was OK. Paul would later tell the riveting story of his escape from the tower - including how, while walking down the stairs, he ignored official calls over the public address system to return to his office. He himself was fighting cancer at the time and would die of that disease only a few months later. We learned later that one of the members of our church died in the World Trade Center; reportedly, he had stayed in the building to help people get out.

I eventually went home from work early and watched television coverage of the surreal day. And things remained surreal in our corner of the world for a while. Shortly thereafter anthrax was found in letters mailed from the Hamilton, New Jersey, postal facility not far from where my wife and I lived. We didn’t get our mail for a while. Much later, some of it showed up in plastic packages and looking discolored and rather mangled - irradiated, the package said. To this date, I don’t believe anyone has been convicted of the anthrax terrorism.

The anthrax only added more anxiety to those strange days. The world seemed shaken loose from its moorings, and we wondered when the next attack might come. I became even more of a news junkie from that day on, even to an unhealthy degree for a while.

As for my thoughts now, I feel a sense of mourning, both for those who died on September 11 and for those who have died as a result of my country’s actions as it has sought justice and revenge for that day. Although I supported the United States and other nations going to war in Afghanistan, the totality of the violence we have wrought on innocent people as a result of the Global War on Terror - particularly in Iraq - far exceeds that of September 11. That is something that many people in this country do not acknowledge. It’s time that we do.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 11:31 am and is filed under Autobiography, Other Places, Politics.