MILESFORTIS

Let’s Talk 9/11, Then and Now

“Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely. If something happens to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.” —Rick Rescorla, on the phone to his wife from the South Tower

September 11, 2001 was a day unlike any other.

You read that date right. After weeks of research done completely behind my girlfriend’s back, I pulled out my Visa and put the recommended two months’ salary into a diamond engagement ring. This being (barely) the 21st Century, and me being a technophile seemingly since birth, of course I did the whole thing online.

The ring would FedEx to me overnight from Seattle to Colorado Springs the next day, but I wasn’t really concerned about how long it would take. I had an engagement plan brewing that revolved around her birthday in November, so there was plenty of time. Melissa honestly had no idea about any of it, but that’s a story for another day.

I stayed up well past my customary midnight bedtime. Because, yes, I was more than a little excited to get the tracking number that would make everything seem that much more real. That’s why I was still dead asleep when the phone rang at the most uncivilized time of 7:45 a.m.

There was probably as much irritation as sleep in my voice when I said, “Hello?”

“Turn on the TV,” my mom said without any introduction.

“Which channel?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, s***,” I may or may not have said out loud, before leaping out of bed, running down to the ground floor of my little townhouse, and turning on the TV. And there they were, the Twin Towers, burning and spitting out incomprehensible plumes of smoke.

Mom filled me in quickly on what little she knew, but it was clear that barbarians had attacked us in the most dastardly way — and at the heart of the world’s greatest city.

Too little sleep and too much coffee and far too much shock don’t exactly add up to perfect memories, but one moment still stands out clearly these 25 years later.

“Where’s the tower?” I asked Mom, and it must have been right around 8 a.m. when the South Tower collapsed. We tried to puzzle it out, even with all that smoke — dear God, there was so much, and what we couldn’t know was how much of it was dust from the collapsed building — we should have been able to see a freaking skyscraper on TV.

But it was gone. Half an hour later, the North Tower gave up its struggle to remain standing and joined its twin.

Later we would learn of the heroes who rose to the occasion of 9/11. The New York City firefighters who gave all. The prescient Morgan Stanley vice president of security, Rick Rescorla, who spent years training the employees under his care for such an event — and who then died trying to save just a few more when the South Tower fell. The civilians of Flight 93 who sacrificed themselves rather than allow their plane to be used in yet another attack. The rescue efforts at the struck Pentagon. And so many others.

There would be hell to pay after, and there was.

But first… trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

It’s been a quarter of a century, but some scenes from that morning have lost none of their power. The jumpers still fill me with equal measures of sorrow, anger, shock, and even understanding.

Watch. I insist:

In all, around 200 people jumped or fell, or roughly one person either falling or jumping every 30 seconds for more than an hour and a half between the first hit and the second collapse. The narrator in this clip called them “the only visible fatalities in a day that claimed thousands.”

The World Trade Center, particularly the Twin Towers, said something about New York City, about the United States of America, that no other country could match.

We built the world’s tallest building in the world’s greatest city — and we built another one just like it right next door.

Because we could.

The Towers defined the glorious New York City skyline from when I first really became aware of it at the ripe old age of seven during our nation’s Bicentennial celebration. They were as permanent as any other fixture you could imagine, except possibly the Moon.

Then somebody else decided to knock the Towers down because their god told them to. They couldn’t build, but they sure knew how to destroy. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had a 7th Century theocratic mindset with a postmodern sadist’s ability to imagine all-new ways to murder, using a superior civilization’s own tools against it.

If we’ve learned anything in the last quarter century, it’s that bin Laden’s vision is murderously and frustratingly common.

“No more forever wars.”

I wish.

Tell that to countless imams in the so-called Dar al-Salam (House of Peace) and their followers. But they won’t listen because to them, we live in the Dar al-Harb (House of War).

Sorry, but those are the facts. Islam has “bloody borders,” as historian Samuel Huntington warned us in 1993 — the year of the first Muslim attack on the World Trade Center — and you can’t build a wall against airliners, drones, or nuclear-tipped missiles.

The best we can hope for is a deadly game of whack-a-mole. The worst? My hope in 2001 was that we could subdue the worst elements of Dar al-Salam without resorting to nuclear weapons — mostly because I don’t want us becoming them. That’s still my hope.

Hope is not a plan, nor is it a prediction.

We’ve gone 25 years without another 9/11. No matter what mistakes we made in Afghanistan, Iraq, or perhaps even now in Iran (the jury is still out), that one simple fact stands as a testament that we’ve sure as hell gotten an awful lot right since approximately 9/12/2001.

Let us speak now of New York City on 9/11/2026.

There’s a new tower near enough where the Twin Towers once stood, and I suppose it’s technically more attractive than they ever were. But what One World Trade Center adds in grace and sparkle, it lacks in sheer impressive authority. For that, you must visit the 9/11 memorial that leaves in place the footprints of the original towers, gone 25 years now.

Also, I hate the name. The dreamy “One World” haze of the post-Cold War collapsed with the towers on 9/11, and I’d banish that phrase from the English language if I could.

But those are mere nits compared to the city’s current mayor, Zohran Mamdani, the previously ne’er-do-well son of prosperous “migrants” from India via Uganda. Mamdani is both Muslim and socialist, representing the two most powerful and anti-American theologies to be found anywhere in the world today — and now even in Gracie Mansion.

“We noticed the smirk as Mayor Mamdani made sure that a pen used to sign a commemoration for the 9/11 victims’ families was publicly handed, not to a family member, but to a man who acted as an attorney for a terrorist,” PJ Media’s own Victoria Taft wrote earlier this week, and if she were writing fiction, a sharp editor would dismiss it as too wildly unbelievable.

But that’s not all.

Mamdani’s socialist policies will likely burn themselves out, as these things do. But his attempts at rewriting history — at recasting Muslims as the real victims of 9/11 — could prove to have real staying power, as my PJ colleagues have reported for more than a year.

Now, Mamdani chose this of all weeks to release 170,000 pages of internal reports “that show officials misled people about the safety of the air around Ground Zero after the September 11 terror attacks,” as The Independent put it.

Of course the air was poisoned. Anyone with eyes knew that. Our first responders went in anyway, and we owe them whatever they require. Nobody disputes any of that. That the city kept quiet all these years is hardly a point of pride, and I wouldn’t make such a fuss were it not for Mamdani’s timing.

When Mamdani said, “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” it was his way of making things right. It’s his way of diminishing the heroic efforts of the city’s leadership in the hours and weeks after 9/11 — a virtual tearing down of statues, if you will.

“Every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

These are the actions of a Bolshevik seizing power, or an occupying army. Or, you know, the Mayor of New York City on the 25th anniversary of the city’s most horrific day.

Mamdani is, however, what a plurality of the people who bothered to vote chose, so what are you going to do? Apparently the city not only recovered from the shock of 9/11, but got a bad case of amnesia, too.

The enemy isn’t just inside the gates; he’s taken up residence in the halls of power.

But back to 9/11/2001.

At some point during that terrible day, it finally dawned on me that the air travel halt included the FedEx plane that might or might not already have my bride-to-be’s engagement ring loaded up — my entire future wrapped up in a tiny box that was grounded at some airport a thousand miles away.

A week later, the flights resumed and the ring arrived.

Imagine that your country is at war, you’re sitting on the sofa at the end of the day with the love of your life, and there’s an engagement ring stashed in the gun safe. You have one of those perfect moments together, and all you want to do is go get the ring and pop the question.

But you have a plan, so you let the moment pass. And in the next moment you’re back to dreading the next 9/11.

Her birthday arrives exactly on schedule, the plan comes together, and in that perfect moment she says yes.

9/11 couldn’t derail my proposal, but it was the start of a new career.

I checked out Andrew Sullivan’s blog that day — I’d read him since his days at The New Republic — and Sully led readers to a brand-new site called Instapundit.

Glenn Reynolds instantly became a regular read, and after a few weeks, I decided I’d launch a blog of my own just as soon as the engagement surprise/birthday/Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s madness was over.

“In January,” I told my fiancée around Christmas, “I’m going to start a blog.”

“A what?” she replied.

Yeah, it was that long ago.

And yet writing these words, watching those videos, it still feels like yesterday.

We mustn’t forget, but we also shouldn’t wallow. So that’s enough of 9/11 for now, and maybe enough for the next 25 years.

One last thing.

I was young when I started this, and I’ll be old before I stop — if then. All of us will continue looking back at that day, from time to time, but perhaps what’s most remarkable is how much we still look forward. Islamic terrorists were able to alter New York City’s skyline, but they couldn’t put so much as a dent in this American’s hopes.