Twin Traumas

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I left my house in Brooklyn as usual, and headed for the Beverly Road train station, where I waited on the outdoor platform for the Q train. It was such a beautiful morning that I was only a bit surprised when I heard my wife calling to me from the station above the platform. She was standing there with a stroller that presumably contained my infant daughter.

"Tony, Tony... two planes just crashed into the World Trade Center."
"What?"
She repeated what she had said.
"Really?"
"Are you sure you want to go into Manhattan?"
"Sure, why not?"
"They're calling it a major terrorist attack."
"Well, how do they know that? I think I'd better go to work."
"Okay..."

I may have had many things on my mind at that moment. One was that an airplane had once crashed into the Empire State Building, and aside from the plane and its pilot, as far as I could recall, nothing much had resulted from it. Another was that I was working as a bicycle messenger in Midtown Manhattan when a helicopter all but tumbled off the roof of the Pan Am building; someone died from falling shrapnel, a thousand emergency vehicles raced to the scene, but again, not exactly an invasion from Mars. Not another Pearl Harbor. Let's not go crazy here.

My train rose out of the tunnel in downtown Brooklyn and ascended the arc of the Manhattan Bridge. I had not even thought about it as I stood on the platform, but there I was, not half an hour later, facing the Twin Towers: black smoke shot out of them like two giant coal-fired smokestacks, and from the one I had the clearer view of, objects seemed to be falling. I could not make out their exact forms at that distance, but it seemed to me quite likely that I was witnessing the final moments of human beings, alive or already dead, as they were expelled from the inferno across the river.

Thoughts in general are vague and fluid things, but my thought at that moment was as solid as stone and far more so than a steel skyscraper: "Oh my god, I never imagined it could be this bad."

It is 2020, and most people alive today remember that day, and when they first heard the news, and saw the pictures, and felt the sting of what it meant. So here we are, one day into the Big Apple COVID-19 Lockdown, exactly two months after the first reported case of the new coronavirus in the U.S., and if you somehow missed the opportunity 19 years ago, why not just let it out: "I - NEVER - IMAGINED - IT - COULD - BE - THIS - BAD!"

Okay, done. Now for something completely different: a line I love to repeat, by the songwriter Betsy Rose - a line that seems to make its own context, over and over, as long as the world spins on its weirdly tilted axis: "We may have come here on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

The thing is, while every terrorist attack affects us all in some way, the direct effect is much more local. Now we have something that is not local at all. Though it affects people more or less directly depending on whether you or someone you know gets sick, as long as it's around, every one of us is a potential victim, a potential fatality. The idea that "I'll be okay because I'm young" , "I'll be okay because I'm healthy", "I'll be fine because I had a flu shot," etc. is turning into the much less reassuring "I have a lower probability of..." And what that means is that we are, literally, all in the same boat.

Well, it's a very strange boat. The kind that we can only collectively row out of treacherous waters by... staying away from each other?? Physically speaking, yes. But people are coming together in other ways. There was no Internet during the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918. Kids could not have Facetime playdates in the Middle Ages. Scientists couldn't sequence the genetic code of a virus when the Panama Canal was built. As big a mess as we seem to be making of the world, we are also making the tools to fix it. There is some question whether we'll get so far ahead of ourselves that the damage can't be undone. This, I think, is not that occasion - though that is little comfort to the people who don't make it through this crisis.

In any case it's a good reminder of just how bad things can get in a world so interconnected that a virus is killing people all over the planet a few weeks after the first infection in a Wuhan market. One reason the U.S. signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is that it became clear that radiation released anywhere in the world could end up in the air we breathe here. Just as the fuel we burn here can melt polar ice caps, flood cities and destroy coastal economies all over the globe.

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I decided to create this blog, not because I thought I had anything profound to say about our current predicament, but because all day today I was having perfectly mundane thoughts, funny thoughts, hopeful or depressing or obvious thoughts that I wanted to share. Absurd thoughts, like  "This feels just like 9/11, only different."

I imagine there are plenty of others out there putting their thoughts online. Those who have 2000 Facebook friends may not need a blog to do so; I think I had 58 at last count. I don't spend much time on Facebook. I don't do Twitter, but I might if I ever have a thought I can fit into 280 characters (140 was out of the question). If you are blogging about the lockdown, shutdown, meltdown, or whatever you want to call it, and you want me to link to your blog I'd be happy to. Subscribe if you're interested. Comment if you have thoughts. (Comments are moderated, due to bad experiences on some of my other blogs.) Thanks for reading.