I Watched the Planes Fly Past My Classroom Window. Then Came 25 Years of Grievance

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was 13 years old and I wasn’t sure if I was going to live to see 14. Lots of Americans my age remember their teachers rolling the CRT television into their classrooms that morning, that squeaky-wheeled media tower bearing the indelible image of steel behemoths belching smoke and fire into the sky of a bright, beautiful Tuesday morning. Instead, I watched the first plane fly past my classroom’s window, and we murmured that maybe it was some freak accident. Then we watched the second follow it, felt the rumble, heard the wretched car-alarm cacophony triggered by the supersonic blast from the planes. 

My classmates and I were supposed to be writing poems in our English classroom, which was perched on the 10th floor of our high school, which was about six blocks away from the Twin Towers. Our school principal got on the PA to tell us that the FBI said we should stay put — that the towers weren’t going to fall. They fell. 

The 3,300 kids at my school shuffled north on the West Side Highway, escaping the malevolent cloud of vaporized skyscrapers and heading nowhere in particular. There was a point at which the adults completely lost interest in shepherding us (because where would they shepherd us to?) and all of us were simply unleashed into the chaotic, reeling city. I remember calling home on a payphone to let my mom’s then-boyfriend know I was fine so he could let her know — she was in Italy at the time for work and desperate for a last-minute flight back home. I remember a bunch of us kids yelling New Yorkishly (“Ya cheapass jerkoff!”) at a bodega owner for trying to charge $20 for a jug of water. I remember unwell men, shirtless and screaming at the sky: “It was the Germans!” “China did it!” “It was the Dutch!” This last one would have been pretty funny if true.

Were more planes about to start falling? Maybe! Why not? I remember wondering if I was ever going to get back to Brooklyn, because every single train had stopped running, which was itself an unprecedented event that shocked me to the core. 

That morning of raw experience felt, to paraphrase the food writer MFK Fisher, like the pristine, unknowable, and private interior of a whole, unbroken egg. For everyone in downtown Manhattan that morning, the terror of it was ours to hold and contemplate together in all of our ignorance. Any interpretation was valid.

When I finally got to our apartment that afternoon, I ate a bowl of ready-made pasta with jarred pesto: something quick, something mom’s boyfriend-ish. Then I lay in bed and listened to Z100 on the radio. The hosts of “The Z Morning Zoo” spoke more softly than usual as they cued up track after track of easy listening tunes and Whitney Houston singing the national anthem. On TV, someone asked plaintively, “Why do they hate us?” It began to stink of war. The egg started to crack. 

Now, 25 years later, it’s clear to me that any political beliefs I have as an adult sprang from that awful morning. Not just in the bare facts of what happened, but in how wretched and disembodying it felt to witness the overwrought performance of American grief and victimhood unfold when I, by all rights, was among the ones nearest to the epicenter. Even though I literally qualify for the World Trade Center Health Program, I hesitate to claim any relation to the event. To me, 9/11 is so much about a nation that performed innocence and hurt while becoming crasser, deadlier, and more terrified of its own shadow.

Soon, there were stories about Muslims, then Sikhs, then anybody brown being brutalized on the streets in some twisted mob-style campaign of retribution. Criticism of the president and the burgeoning wars in Afghanistan, then Iraq, was treated like you were spitting on the mass graves of the 2,977 who died on 9/11. It was the infomercials for 9/11 commemorative coins; President George W. Bush solemnly saying “Let’s roll,” in an echo of Flight 93 victim Todd Beamer to conclude his State of the Union address; the B-roll on newscasts of Americans wearing American flags, hugging each other and crying; the entreaties from the government to go shop; Rudy Giuliani briefly angling for a third term as New York mayor because the city “needed” him.

Even as it waged a lethal war overseas, domestically America transformed into a fragile, breakable thing. During the weird weeks when school was out — because our dust-covered building was being used as a medical triage center — I just listened to the radio. The music seemed drained of color, and it wasn’t just because I was traumatized. In response to the attacks, Clear Channel, which owned Z100, sent its stations a list of songs that they were strongly discouraged from playing on air, including those that were too joyful; that mentioned planes, flying, or falling; that had even a hint of anti-American critique. We got endless hours of Jewel and “God Bless the USA” when all I wanted was Rage Against the Machine. Right-wingers joking about “trigger warnings” nowadays conveniently forget the era of “TW: September.” 

Thank goodness for the Onion, which ran its end-of-September print edition with the headline, “U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We’re At War With.”

Even at my tender age, I knew a scam when I saw one. Grief was one thing. I felt that: I grieved for my city, and even a little for myself. But grievance as politics? That was the real con. Unlike grief, grievance has no trajectory. No closure. It is forever hungry for blood, and it only grows hungrier with time. Even now, those seeking to whip up a frenzy from racist, 9/11-style grievances are gnashing their teeth over the mere existence of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, who was 9 years old in 2001; they’re not much different from those men I saw screaming at the sky decades ago.

Maybe it’s poetic that, this week, it was Mamdani who finally authorized the release of 170,000 pages of city records detailing the environmental and health impacts of the attacks — information that the Giuliani and Bush administrations kept from the public. On Oct. 9, 2001, classes resumed at my high school, despite the fact that parts of Ground Zero were still on fire. We were told it was safe. Nevermind the fact that for months afterward, strangers wearing full PPE came to our classrooms with air monitors as we sat there, breathing in that toxic dust and smoke. 

While the United States has poured more than an estimated $5.8 trillion into its post-9/11 war efforts, it took sustained public shaming (especially by Jon Stewart) to fund healthcare for the many first responders, volunteers, neighborhood residents, and survivors like me and my classmates who were stricken with cancers and chronic respiratory illnesses in the wake of the attacks. I remember the jokes my friends would make whenever those air monitor people came by: that in a few decades, we’d all start dropping like flies. While I did, in fact, live to see 14, I will spend the rest of my life waiting to find out what years of inhaling Twin Towers dust will do to a body in the long run.  

My personal politics comes from a deep desire to not do whatever the hell the last 25 years was again, while the people in power rinse and repeat the “can’t let the terrorists win” thing until the end of time. Again, we’re in a war in the Gulf that’s not really a war — to the extent that military widows aren’t getting benefits for their spouses’ otherwise meaningless deaths in Iran because of semantics. Instead of working to beat Republicans in the midterms, craven U.S. Democrats are wasting time disavowing a leftist Twitch streamer and making it illegal for universities to not invest in Israeli companies. 

This isn’t the behavior of a healthy nation but a haunted one. Actually metabolizing the grief of that day didn’t have to take two wars, drone strikes on weddings, the black sites, the Patriot Act and Homeland Security, the goddamn lingering indignity of hours-long interrogations that so many of my Muslim comrades go through just to travel to this day. 

You can’t uncrack an egg. But the memory of that quivering moment, before the ongoing call for vengeance — when 13-year-old me genuinely had no idea how America would turn out — is something I still think about every day, especially when I start to feel discouraged or cynical about the future. On September 11, my favorite wisecracking radio DJs took calls from listeners and wept with them. Hundreds of first responders rushed into the burning towers to save whomever they could. A girl I had just met shared her sandwich with me as we fled the cloud of smoke and ash. We were kind to each other. Violence didn’t feel inevitable. This is how I want to remember that day.