Four Years Ago Today

Everybody has their own story about what they were doing on September 11, 2001 when they heard the news coming out of New York. This is mine. It started out as a regular Tuesday morning, and I had come out of the shower just after 9:00am was getting ready to go to work. I heard the news on the radio that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. The news anchor and morning host were talking about the scene they were witnessing on TV, and how this was a terrible accident. Then the second plane hit the other tower, and the morning host yelled, "This is no accident!" I was then transfixed in front of the CNN images of the Twin Towers that were right out of a B movie. I was feeling ill, but knew I had to go into work.

I took my twenty minute drive into work, listening to developments on the radio and knowing full well that this was not going to be a productive day. When I got to work, just about everybody there was huddled in stunned silence around the TV. This would ordinarily be a busy time for us, with the Toronto International Film Festival going on, but the phones were deafly silent that morning. One Senior VP was beside herself with what she was seeing, and said, "We should just go home! We shouldn't be fucking working today!" but we all knew that wasn't going to happen. Eventually we tried to get into our routine, but nobody stayed away from the TV for very long, and radios were on in every room. By now we knew about the plane hitting the Pentagon, and would soon hear about the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. Because of the frantic nature of the news reports, we thought that there had been other planes hijacked in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but those turned out to be the destinations of the four doomed flights. Then, the towers collapsed. And that's when the whole event truly sunk in.

Unfortunately, it didn't sink in for everybody. By mid-day, downtown Toronto had shut down. The tall buildings had been evacuated, and a number of streets in the business district were closed off. Traffic became a nightmare, which severely delayed local deliveries. And while the Film Festival cancelled its events for the day, Andrew Krystal (the host of a radio entertainment program at the time) called us demanding the delivery of audio film clips. We tried to explain to him that deliveries would be delayed because of the events of the day - and that the point should be self-evident. He would have none of that. "I don't care if there are people dying in New York, I have a show to put together." (Several months later, Krystal came by the office to pick up a tape and we saw that he had a big gash on his ear. His barber had clipped more than just his hair. Karma's a bitch.)

After all is said and done, Hurricane Katrina will be a bigger human and material tragedy than 9/11, even if the death toll doesn't turn out to be higher. But it's hard to imagine any event traumatizing a nation and the world like what happened out of the blue four years ago. Nobody who witnessed it will ever forget what they saw, and the utter fear and helplessness they felt at that moment. After all, if you can't be kept safe in the United States of America, where can you be safe? That is why people from all over the world were touched by what happened. But 9/11 was also the first time people in many countries experienced the same kind of fear felt by those in many other countries on a regular basis, whether because of terrorism or war. As we continue on with our relatively sheltered lives, that should never be forgotten either.