I’m sitting at gate A6 at Jacksonville International Airport in Florida. Today is September 11, 2023. Two days ago, I was supposed to fly to Athens, Greece, on September 9, but that is a long and frustrating story.
Today is the 22nd anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I paused to thank the TSA officer who checked my ID this morning at 6:14 a.m. even though I have read that a: a relatively large number of lethal items routinely get through security and b: that the TSA security system is primarily window dressing designed to give the American people the illusion that they are safe.
He was surprised and gratified.
Nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11.
Last night, at the bright lobby bar at my hotel in Jacksonville, I nibbled at a quesadilla and sipped a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. There were half a dozen other stragglers at the bar. We half-watched an NFL football game (week one). Then the game ended, 60 Minutes came on, with a deeply moving tribute to the NYFD firefighters who sacrificed their lives to rescue as many people trapped in the towers as possible.
Oblivious to the date (really even the month) after several harrowing days of delayed flights, canceled flights, pilots “timing out,” long hours watching the departure screens in several airports for updates, the obfuscations of the beleaguered flight agents, late-night Ubers to airport hotels, and the antics of angry passengers, I wondered why CBS would do an entire hour on that dreadful day now.
And then it came to me that it was the eve of the 22nd anniversary of 9/11. It crept up on me unannounced this year. It’s been nearly a quarter century now! How could that have happened? I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I was in Phoenix. Getting home was an ordeal, but the only thing I wanted in this world was to fold my seven-year-old daughter in my arms.
We bar stragglers watched 60 Minutes for a couple of segments. Then the bartender said, “Would you consider me an a-hole if I changed the channel? This is pretty depressing.” We all agreed, and she found the Sunday Night Football game, which we quarter-watched. But whatever joy we had felt earlier in the evening was now gone.
That terrible day.
For more than a year afterward, I had a “plan” for what I would do if a plane I was on were hijacked, and I carried a few items in my backpack that might be useful somehow.
Today, on another 9/11, I will fly first to Washington Dulles and then, with any luck, from D.C. to Athens in Greece, where that same daughter, now 29, waits to fold me in her arms. I have no anxiety about flying today. That “long war against Islamic terrorism” that President Bush promised us has faded and fizzled, and the FBI tells us that the greatest terror threat of this period is domestic.
9/11 commemoration television has now joined the ranks of the Kennedy assassination. Once a year, we revisit the trauma. Both the Zapruder film, which I have seen 100 or more times over the years, and the images of the planes striking the Towers are too hard to watch. I try to imagine how these commemorations affect families who lost loved ones on those catastrophic days.
How many of my fellow passengers at A6, A7, A8, A9, and A10, now numbering more than 200, are lost in reflection this morning? And I wonder who, if anyone, is plotting Death to America this bright and sunny September morning.