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In that one moment, the world was watching. Everything went quiet and people stopped in their tracks wherever they where to watch. The next day, people wanted to know who was responsible for the attack, they wanted to know what the government was going to do about it, they wanted to know if they would be able to go on with their lives. But in that one moment, the whole world just froze to capture what was going on. Because it was that one moment of panic and chaos, that made the difference between life and death for the people of 9/11.
We started reading Jonathan Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” in our ASTU class last week, and we talked about 9/11 and what it means today almost 15 years after everything happened.
When I think of 9/11 I can’t imagine what it must have felt like for the people who were affected by it, for the people who lost someone close to them. For them, that one moment must have felt like eternity because it meant that they didn’t know if their loved ones were going to be okay. But I also think about the people that were at the World Trade Center, I can’t imagine what it must have felt to be inside, not knowing if you were going to make it.
Focusing on Foer’s novel, I think about the voicemails that Oskar’s dad left before he died. At first, they had a tone of optimism in them, reassuring whoever was standing on the other side of the line that everything was going to be okay. However, as we “listened” to the other ones, we could clearly tell that things were getting worse and that Thomas was not going to make it. In every voicemail Thomas would say: “are you there?”, because maybe at some level he knew that there would be someone to pick up the phone, and he wasn’t wrong. Oskar was there, he listened to the messages and he did not pick up the phone. Foer’s story is fiction, but I’m pretty sure that there were cases in which the person at the other end of the line was reacting the same way that Oskar was.
Moreover, when we remember 9/11 we think of the 2977 people that died that day, we also think about Al-Qaeda and the fact that they were responsible for the attack. Nevertheless, rarely do we think about the individual lives that were lost and how they lived their last minutes. We don’t think about the despair, about what it must have felt to be in that situation where you couldn’t tell your loved ones that everything was going to be alright, because you didn’t know it yourself. Those people were in the middle of a battlefield and they didn’t even know it. When I think about all the lives lost after this event, how it all unraveled and turned into a fireball that was impossible to stop, I feel that the blood that was lost in that one day was enough. I think that sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters were lost that day, and they are not coming back. Hence, what about the people that lost their loved ones at the World Trade Center? Their loss does not go beyond that day; it cannot be amended by all those attacks that happened afterwards in order to capture Bin Laden. Their loss is reduced to that one moment when the world stood watching.
