9/11

I was in America when 9/11 happened. Not in New York but on the other side of the country: the San Francisco Bay Area. It was a sunny Tuesday morning, I remember, and as usual I woke up around 8:15 in the morning to prepare for work which was just a 20-minute bus ride away. I was living with my cousin then, and usually by the time I wake up he has already left for work; that day, I saw him watching the news with a grave look that will only be clear to me in the moments to follow.

"Planes crashed into the World Trade Center," he said. "The towers are gone." He had just visited the towers a few weeks back, bringing me a souvenir keychain.

"What do you mean they're gone?" I asked. "How could they be gone?"

"They're gone. They fell into the ground. Like in the demolition movies," he replied.

By the time I woke up it was already 11:15 in New York and all the events of 9/11 had transpired. Details were still hazy-- there were rumours that bombs detonated all over Washington, that the Air Force just shot down another plane, that around 10,000 people may have died.

Before I got the complete picture I took my usual bus ride to work. No one made a sound in the bus that day-- no chatty old men, no teeners tapping their cd-man-- but the mood was electric. Everyone was aware of what happened and the shock was at its strongest.

My officemates and I immediately talked about what happened and all the theories of who did it. We learned that the best friend of one of my officemates worked in WTC-- she made it out. We watched footages via video streaming, which was still very low quality those days. Over and over, we watched as UA175 hit the South Tower-- there were no footages of the other attacks yet. Airplanes usually pass over our office building, which is just a 15-minute drive from the San Francisco Airport. That day there were no flights and silence replaced the usual roar of passing planes.

By lunch time, our boss allowed us to go home. There was less traffic than usual along El Camino Real that day, so it took longer to get a bus home. While waiting for a bus I saw a lone young man-- maybe in his late teens or early 20's-- walking the length of the thoroughfare waving the American flag. I saw more flags on the way home, and even more being put up. I decided to get a flag myself.

Looking back after six years, nothing really compares to the mood and electricity of that day. Even I, whose politics you all know, proudly waved the Stars and Stripes. It was a shared feeling of shock and anger at what happened, tempered by the empathy one felt for his community and his country. Politics was set aside, replaced only by the oneness that can only come after a shared jarring experience. As famously written by Jean-Marie Colombani in Le Monde: Nous sommes tous Americains. We are all Americans.

Looking back after six years, I am truly saddened that things turned out the way they did. How, from a point of almost unshakeable unity, policy after disastrous policy has given us the utterly polarised world and America we now see. How the world's compassion and support was met with arrogance and contempt.

We were all Americans.