The Day of Terror that Changed the World

The second-grade kids in Martin Luther King elementary school in South Carolina wander among the scattered wreckage in Hangar 17 at Kennedy Airport that still needs to be put away, like the schoolchildren of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, well-mannered and slightly bored, turning the pages of the brochures about that day without truly understanding and being able to remember. When the towers died, they were not even born, and if eight years do not feel like much for old people, they represent an entire life for children.

There is a new president in place of Bush, who moved us with a megaphone in his hand, standing alone on the steel girders swearing revenge and promising justice. Now he is just a retired guy in Texas.

There is a generation of young Americans for whom September 11th is just another story, museum, school trip, monument to the dead along another street of remembrance for an ongoing war, a war that killed more men and women, good and bad, guilty and innocent, than those who died on that late summer day.

On Vesey Street, the museum that the excavators and cranes are building in place of the craters is growing, and when monuments are built, the memory of the survivors helplessly fades away. New York is not a city that loves to bask in the past; it amazingly manages to digest and metabolize events that would demolish more fragile cities and communities, like those sequences of pure horror that every September for eight years have been coming back like a horror movie. They get presented like a fountain from which to draw our memory on fire, and to explain why 4343 American citizens in Iraq and over 1000 in Afghanistan have been added to the 2993 that died in the World Trade Center, besides the countless Iraqis and Afghans. But the dust of tiredness, like the one that spread after the collapse of the Twin Towers, is enveloping everything, and has consumed 800 human lives with methodic slowness, among them firemen, cops and the people who passed by and breathed in the air.

Manhattan, the city that was supposed to die that morning – according to the criminals in command of the two jets – is an eight-year-old little girl, like the visitors on their trip to Hangar 17, which houses the temporary deposit of memories. Manhattan has already experienced another – albeit banal, behind all the journalistic hyperboles – cycle of “boom and bust.” The housing prices that the inhabitants should have abandoned in the certainty of a “second wave,” have doubled and then halved in the span of those children’s lives. While public authorities writhed to choose the reconstruction project among the 50,000 sent from architecture studios all over the world, entire somnolent neighborhoods, scruffy and infamous for decades, the slaughterhouses, Hell’s Kitchen, the factions of old TriBeca are still untouched; the outposts of black Harlem, as well as a shrinking Spanish Harlem, the most sordid West Side, have been demolished and rebuilt and turned into luxurious condos, restaurants for “glittered,” “very important” people, rap and hip-hop millionaires, pimps, sport parasites, in an explosion of joy of life and willingness to perform on that world stage where no fire started by any idiotic fanatic will ever burn more intensely than the bonfire of vanities.

Wall Street managed to arrive at extraordinary heights, to precipitate and rise again, sweeping away the people who boxed up their belongings, people who, just one year ago, in another September that looked fatal – always September – announced the end of the world of capitalism, consumerism and speculation. While it was only Lehman’s, Bear/Stearns’ and Merrill Lynch’s world that came to an end, everything starts all over again.

The dead have buried other dead, and the living have gone back to what they were doing before, with new prophecies of catastrophes, announcements of terrorist attacks now and then snarled by the defeated like Dick Cheney (the shadow president who governed behind the silhouette of George W. Bush and today is predicting what he secretly longs for, that Barack Obama has to suffer the hatred that Cheney and his people suffered when it was realized they lacked the foresight to see September 11th happening).

The memorial of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan will be beautiful, with plaques, carved names and 30 oaks, trees of permanence against the ephemeral nature of life. There will be new skyscrapers, a sparkling subway station and schoolchildren on guided tours. On that day we will hear the voices of the survivors telling the story of that morning through loudspeakers and the things Obama will say to pass his first September 11th as president to try and move an America that does not care about the democracy exported to Iraq, like the reporters in newspapers and the television news sequences warned. An America that, since August, has been also rejecting Afghanistan’s liberation, declaring itself, for the first time in eight years, adverse to that war too, and favorable to “everybody going home.”

It will be moving when, in Hangar 17, tons of garbage, twisted bikes and pieces of girder, still marked by the firemen that died down there and surely covered with trace DNA from almost 1000 dead whose remains have never been found or recognized, will be picked up; it will be moving, and sweetly useless. The true, indestructible memorial that New York will build for the victims – employees, delivery people, managers, apprentices, foreign tourists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Atheists and illegal immigrants – is New York itself. The city that stood up, proud even if hurt, while its enemies keep on writhing in the dark of their mystic and demented loneliness. The city that “never sleeps,” the song says, but, most of all, never dies.