Remembering 9/11

It was a Tuesday morning when I was in the elevator on the way up to the floor where I worked in Toronto.  It was a building on Queen Street, a few steps away from Bay Street.  As I was going up to my floor, there it was on the screen.  "Plane hits World Trade Center." 

While a plane crashing into a building wasn't the spectacle the situation became, especially knowing that a plane did crash into the Empire State Building decades before this moment, it all changed when I just got into my office and watched a plane strike into the other building.  That's when it started becoming surreal.  The eyes of everyone working at my office had their eyes glued to the TV set.

The reason why we had these TV's was because I worked for a clearing facility for the Montreal Exchange and Winnipeg Commodities Exchange, and we kept our eyes on the stock action since that was how we got an indication of how the night jobs would go.  The more action we saw, the more indicators we got of margin calls on the way.

So there we were watching, and then the unthinkable happened.  WTC2 came crashing down and within the half hour, WTC1 followed.  I didn't know what to think.  I can't think of a more horrific moment that I experienced since the Challenger disaster of 1986.  And it all changed from tragic to absurd as WTC7 went down later that day and other buildings became condemned. 

Washington was hit at the Pentagon, but we weren't sure what hit it and how.  And United flight 93 became the stuff of legends and folklore.

Either way, the world around us changed.  Unfortunately, that change was not for the better.

So began our descent into the darkness of the years that would encompass the presidency of George W. Bush.  It ceased to be a catastrophe and became more of a marketing ploy.  Every time someone questioned any invasion of privacy, 9/11 became the scapegoat.  Every muslim that was harassed on our home soil and those harassed while travelling abroad were all subjected to atrocities, all in the name of 9/11.  It became a campaign slogan for the presidential election in 2004.  And it became an opportunity.  The dogs of war would eventually be let loose in a country with tricky terrain, pit falls and a fractious society mired in tribalism, with no clear leader.  It was the beginning of the invasion of Afganistan.  It would take them 10 years to find the person they believed to be the mastermind.  But it was more than an excuse to invade Afganistan.  It became an excuse to go get Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Eventually, we'd find out that this tragedy became a catalyst for a group called the Project for a New American Century, which saw this as an opportunity to control the Middle East.  But rather than a full-fledged military operation, it became a profiteering expedition for companies like Haliburton, GE and a private mercenary group called "Blackwater".

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman rightfully looked at that day as a moment of great shame.  We allowed the tragedy to be convoluted and manipulated to meet the ends of the powers that be in Washington.  Our country sent troops into harm's way to appease our neighbours in the south, to find that nothing was really accomplished other than propping up the legitimacy of some puppet leader of the country.

Sadly, I can't name a single positive accomplishment from this whole tragedy.  It has destroyed more lives and healed even less.  That is the legacy left behind by 9/11.